PowerPoint tips and presentation skills

I recently had a senior marketer from a big mobile phone operator come to the office. He was a friendly chap who was at the top of his game, having delivered every kind of marketing campaign under the sun, and successfully too.

This was an ideal opportunity to get a little insight into the mind of a senior level marketer in a hugely successful company, so I asked him what one thing had helped him the most in his career – his answer was getting good at PowerPoint!

Perhaps like me at the time, you were expecting to hear a deep philosophical approach to strategic marketing or insight into the mind of the ever changing consumer. His reasoning was that in his 20 year career one thing he’d been consistently asked to do was present to other people, and in the last 15, using PowerPoint…he says he’s pretty good at it now!!

Here’s ten tips to help you harness the power of PowerPoint!

1)    Choose a good slide design. Make sure it’s clear and use the company branding/colours where you can.

2)    Tell a story with your presentation and work out the most logical order of your slides. 
        Don’t make it too long – stick to the rule of thumb of a minute a slide.

3)    Keep it simple – don’t make your slides over complicated. Don’t clutter them up with lots
        of unnecessary pictures that don’t support your message. 
        Be clear on what your message is!

4)    Don’t put too much text on your slides – they are only supposed to be there as a
guide for you to present, don’t just read what’s on them. This is a massive gripe of many
of our clients! 

5)    Think about text size and font type – make sure it’s readable for the people who are
        interviewing you.  It probably needs to be larger than you think.

6)    Understand your audience – who’s going to be in the room when you present?
        Use appropriate language and be aware of the responsibilities they have. 

7)    Don’t overcomplicate slides with animation - animation is a good thing, but don’t overdo it. I’ve seen presentations before where things were flying all over the place!!

8)    When you’re happy, check it’s logical – make sure your presentation flows and split up any slides into more than one if it makes sense to.  If you look at all the slides on one page you can see what needs adding or indeed what needs removing.

9)    Always save it in an older version of power point and have a backup copy somewhere  – this could simply be to email it a Hotmail or gmail account.

10)    Practice, Practice, Practice – rehearse your timings, check your slide builds, and learn what you’re going to say.

Any other useful PowerPoint tips? If there are enough of you with suggestions we’ll create another list!

Back to the blog >>