Business Writing Skills You Need for an Effective PowerPoint Presentation

A presentation is a marketing tool that has a specific task and the expected result. Here are some top-notch tips from a professional service which processes student requests like “write my PowerPoint presentation” and you can use right away to make stellar business presentations, impress your colleagues and potential investors.

Asking the right questions

A presentation is a marketing tool that has a specific task and the expected result. You can’t just pick up and call a busy person for coffee, they need to know what to expect from this meeting. The presentation is the same meeting, only recorded on slides accompanied by pictures.

There are three questions to ask before creating a presentation:

1. Who will read the presentation? The secretary and the top manager read the documents differently, and you need to understand exactly which way the presentation will go before it falls into the hands of the decision-maker. The reason for all the mistakes in the presentations is one: the person makes the slides not for the viewer, but for himself.
2. How will the presentation be watched? On your phone or computer, on your big screen, or in print? Does the person read it themselves, or will someone comment?
3. What result do you want to achieve? You need to know what you want from the person as a result: that she writes you a letter, calls go to the site, fills in something, or meets in person.

Focusing on the major idea

90% of the time you create a presentation – develop an idea.

If this is a good presentation, 90% of the time goes to the idea. An idea is a form that you provide to your business proposal.

For example, you sell vacuum cleaners. You can make a presentation similar to the instructions where you will tell that the hoses of these vacuum cleaners are longer and more beautiful than usual, and the brushes penetrate into the smallest cracks in the floor. And you can tell the story on behalf of all the dust that is collected in the bag. What types of debris live inside a vacuum cleaner? How did they get here? Telling a story is always better than telling dry facts.

When the idea is ready, it takes 20 minutes to describe and another 15 minutes to spread info among the slides.

Creating presentations according to their purpose

The purpose of the presentation dictates its type, its style. There several types of presentation you may need to deal with:

1. Presentations for startups (pitch deck). These are 10-slide presentations that take turns exploring all aspects of the market and the benefits of new business.
2. Business presentations. They are divided into subtypes, including sales reports, strategies, cases, budget plans, consulting, portfolio, franchise.
3. Sales presentations. It’s something like a landing page, but there are some differences. There are presentations that introduce you to a company, specialist or sell a specific product or service.
4. Marketing presentations. This is a separate world. These include tender presentations, media campaigns, social media campaigns, SWOT analysis, communication strategies, PR planning, market and competitor research, reports, event offers, user profiles, content plans, and more.
5. Educational presentations. In all modern universities, students present their research and projects on slides.

Keeping the purpose of every slide in mind

The visual design of the slide should be relevant to its purpose. There are four types:

• Prompter slide – tells you what to talk about. It contains a short phrase or picture that is needed during the speech to cover the issue for 3-5 minutes. Always think in what format a person will see a presentation – will he hear it, or just read it? Without a speaker, such a slide can be incomprehensible or even superfluous.
• Wow slide – Stuns viewers emotionally. People want to take a picture of it, to put it on Facebook or just save it to themselves. This is always an emotional slide: here, you can plan the feelings you want to evoke. If there is not a single wow slide in your presentation, it is sad. At least two slides should be wow: one at the beginning, and the second – about your solution to the problem.
• Smart Slide – Explains complex ideas, formulas, or diagrams. No one likes it when the presentation is completely beautiful, creative, and bright, but has no “meat” in it. Add some boring slides. Smart slides are always specific, information — here is the place for diagrams, tables.
• Daring slide – convincing, giving comparisons, and arguments. The most important slide. There should be several of them. They need to be put in the “decision” block, a comparative analysis, description of the service or case file served here works well. Here you need to collect what finally convinces the viewer that you are cool guys.

Presenting with minimal stress

It is important to understand the topic of the speech. When a person knows what he is talking about, the hardest thing to do is to start seeing 100 people in front of you and say hello to them. If you have a cool presentation, but you weren’t the one making it, or, for example, you copied the idea, then you will tell it poorly. Make a presentation the way you would present the subject at lunch. And do not try too hard — everything will be fine.

If you are not sure you can deal with an important business presentation in a given time, at the required level of quality, address a professional writing service for timely assistance.