Presenters like to have order in their lives. Organization of your slides is key to knowing your story and hitting important pieces of content. Straying from this may make you feel thrown off balance. But there is important question you should ask at the beginning of your presentation to better meet your audience’s needs. Using this question may affect the order of your presentation, but will wield impactful results. This article will tell you the one question you should ask every presentation audience and how it may impact your slideshow.
The One Question
Presentations are used to serve audience’s needs. Many presenters are eager to jump right into their prepared introduction. But there’s a better to discover what your audience is hoping to learn based off one question recommended by Forbes contributor and public speaking expert Mark Murphy.
“What’s one thing you’d like to learn that would make this a great use of your time?”
Most speakers think they have an idea of what their presentation audience wants to hear. But have you ever directly asked them what their expectations are before diving into your deck? Their response may surprise you but will create a more engaging experience for your audience. Murphy says, “Rather than you speaking for an hour and hoping that you stumble onto the right topic, it is often much better to just begin with a question and guarantee that you deliver the exact information your audience wants.”
Brace For Impact
Depending on how your audience responds to your question, this could change up the order of your presentation slides. The best way to prepare for this is to overcompensate on the number of slides and make them easily accessible.
It’s better to have more slides than you need than not enough. You can always skip over content that isn’t of interest to your audience. Ethos3 is all for breaking apart content on slides to make messages simple and easier to digest. This allows the presenter to spend as much or as little time on each slide during the presentation.
To make these additional slides easily accessible, consider including internal navigation links. We have an easy step-by-step walkthrough to help you. You can use a navigation slide to lay out each section and use links to jump from section to section. You can also use a icon on each slide to work as a link back to the main navigation menu.
Give your audience what they are asking for. Ask your presentation audience what they need to hear from you. Then customize your deck to meet their needs by making your slides simple and easy to find. For more presentation tips and tricks, sign up for our monthly newsletter and make your presentations impactful.
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