The Essentials of a Successful Presentation
Not all tips will be applicable to every presentation. It’s vital to strike a balance to avoid overloading your presentation or making it appear too rehearsed. Select the tips that best align with your objectives and audience.
Strategies for Outstanding Presentations
1. Maintain Eye Contact and Smile Eye contact helps your audience feel valued and personally addressed, enhancing their connection with you and your topic. To build confidence, begin by making eye contact with someone who appears engaged. As you become more comfortable, extend your gaze to include more of the audience.
2. Use Gestures and Facial Expressions Employ gestures to emphasize your points and maintain an open, friendly demeanor. Stand straight and avoid closed-off body language like crossed arms. Smiling and showing enthusiasm can significantly strengthen your message.
3. Avoid Distractions Minimize distractions by setting aside tools like laser pointers or pens when not in use. This keeps your hands free for gestures and helps you stay focused on your delivery.
4. Be Prepared: Practice Makes Perfect Preparation is essential. Rehearse in front of others, take notes, experiment with your delivery, time yourself, and record your practice sessions to identify areas for improvement.
5. Be Confident Confidence in your topic translates to audience confidence in you. Try to relax, and if comfortable, move around the room to engage more directly with your audience.
6. Start and End Effectively Begin with a strong, attention-grabbing opening, such as a story, joke, or thought-provoking question. Outline the structure of your presentation to guide your audience. Conclude with a memorable ending, such as a call to action, a quote, or a personal story, and always thank your audience.
7. Speak Freely Avoid reading your presentation verbatim. Speak clearly and naturally, using note cards with bullet points if needed. Memorize your introduction and conclusion to maintain eye contact during these critical parts.
8. Avoid Filler Words Eliminate filler words like “um” and “so” to make your presentation more polished and professional.
9. Bring Something to Share Enhance your presentation with handouts or relevant props to make your message more tangible and engaging.
10. Use Different Types of Media Incorporate various media types, such as videos, flipcharts, or whiteboards, to keep your audience engaged and make your presentation dynamic.
11. Use Effective Pauses Pause to give your audience time to absorb information. Pauses can also emphasize important points and give you a moment to collect your thoughts.
12. Speak the Audience’s Language Tailor your language and examples to your audience’s level of understanding and interests. Avoid jargon unless it’s well explained.
13. Engage with the Audience Keep your audience involved by asking questions and interacting with them. Use examples that include your audience members to make your points more relatable.
14. Manage Stage Fright Instead of fighting stage fright, acknowledge it and transform it into positive energy. Take deep breaths to calm your nerves.
15. Choose the Right Stance Position yourself effectively. Avoid standing directly in front of your audience like a barrier. Stand slightly to the side to appear more approachable. If using a podium, move away occasionally to keep the presentation dynamic.
Enhancing Your Business Presentations: Key Tips
Sometimes, the smallest changes in your presentations can make the biggest differences. One effective strategy is to learn a few phrases that give you confidence during your speech. Here are some important verbs to get you started:
- To outline
- To clarify
- To highlight
- To emphasize
- To walk you through (very common in business presentations!)
- To send around
- To carry on (similar to continue)
- To get carried away
- To sum up (similar to summarize)
- To focus on
Vocabulary to Start Your Presentation
Learn how to powerfully start your presentation with these four simple steps. Here’s some vocabulary you can use:
Welcome Your Audience
- “Good morning/afternoon/evening, everyone. Thank you for joining us today, and welcome to today’s webinar.”
- “Hello, everyone. I’m very happy to be speaking with you today.”
Introduce Yourself
- “My name is Etienne, and I’m a Business English Tutor here at Edulo
- “First of all, a little bit about my background – I am the Team Lead at [Company], and I’ve been in charge of [your main responsibility] for [X] years.”
- “I’d like to tell you a bit about myself – my name is Etienne Eloff, and I’m the Operations Manager here at [Company].”
Introduce the Topic and Goal of the Presentation
- “Today, I’d like to talk about…”
- “This presentation will take about [X] minutes, and we will discuss…”
- “We’ve allocated [X] minutes to this presentation, and I’ll talk about…”
- “I’d like to give you a brief breakdown of…”
- “I’d like to take this opportunity to talk about…”
- “The main goal of this presentation is…”
- “The purpose of this presentation is…”
- “My objective today is…”
Addressing Questions from the Audience
- “If you have any questions about anything, feel free to interrupt.”
- “If anything isn’t clear, please click on the ‘raise hand’ button, and I’ll do my best to answer your question.”
- “I’d be happy to answer your questions at the end of the presentation.”
- “If you have any questions, please kindly wait until the end to ask them. We will have [X] minutes for a Q&A session at the end.”
- “Since today’s audience is considerably large, we will not have time for questions, but please email me at etienne@edulo.co.uk.”
Clearing Out Technical Issues
- “Can everyone hear me well? Let me know if you encounter any technical difficulties throughout the presentation.”
- “If you are not speaking, please put yourselves on mute.”
- “If you feel that the sound quality is poor throughout the presentation, please let me know.”
Transitioning to the Main Topic of the Presentation
- “Without further ado”
- “Hi, everyone. I think we might still be missing a few people, but I’m going to kick things off now so we have time to get through everything.”
- “All right, let’s dive right in!”
- “All right, let’s jump right in!”
- “Let’s get started.”
- “Let’s kick things off.”
- “I’m going to talk about…”
- “The purpose/subject of this presentation is…”
- “I’ve divided the presentation into three parts: In the first part, … / Then in the second part, … / Finally, I’ll go on to talk about…”
- “Let me begin by looking at…”
- “Let me start with some general information on…”
Vocabulary for the Main Body of Your Presentation
Introduce a Topic or Section
- “Now let’s move to the first part of the presentation,”
- “So, first…”
- “We can see four advantages and two disadvantages. First,…”
- “On the one hand… On the other hand…”
- “There are two steps involved. The first step is… The second step is…”
- “There are four stages to the project.”
Transition to a New Section
- “All right, let’s turn to…”
- “Now we come to the next point, which is…”
- “Okay, so that’s [topic 1], but what about [topic 2]?”
- “There’s a lot more to talk about, but since we’re pushed for time, let’s move on to [topic 2].”
- “This leads me to my next point, which is…”
Give Examples and Details
- “For example,…”
- “A good example of this is…”
- “To illustrate this point,…”
- “This reminds me of…”
- “To give you an example,…”
- “Let me elaborate further on…”
Describe Visual Aids
- “As you can see [from this infographic]…”
- “This chart shows…”
- “If you look at this graph, you will see…”
- “From this chart, we can understand how…”
- “Let me show you this [image, graph, diagram]…”
- “On the right/left…”
- “In the middle of…”
- “At the top/bottom of the picture…”
Emphasize an Idea
- “This is important because…”
- “I’d like to emphasize that…”
- “We have to remember that…”
Repeat the Same Message with Different Words
- “In other words…”
- “To put it more simply…”
- “So, what I’m saying is that…”
- “Let me say that again…”
Finishing Your Presentation and Summarizing
The end of a presentation, together with the opening, is one of the most important parts of your speech. Here are some effective strategies to close your presentation and the vocabulary to use:
- “That’s all I want to say for now about [topic].”
- “To sum up,…”
- “This sums up [topic].”
- “So in a nutshell,…”
- “So to recap,…”
- “In brief,…”
- “To conclude,…”
- “I’d like to conclude by emphasizing the main points…”
- “That’s it on [topic] for today. In short, we’ve covered…”
- “So, now I’d be very interested to hear your comments.”
- “And this brings us to the end of this presentation. I hope [topic] is a little clearer after today.”
- “So to draw all that together,…”
Start and Navigate the Q&A Session
- “Thank you for your attention. I hope you found this presentation useful, and I’d be happy to answer any questions.”
- “Thank you for listening. We now have [X] minutes left. Do you have any questions?”
- “Thank you for your question, [Name].”
- “I’m glad you asked.”
- “That’s an interesting question.”
- “That’s a great question, I must say. I’m not 100% sure, but off the top of my head, I can tell you that…”
- “Are you asking about [topic 1] or [topic 2]?”
- “Can you please clarify what exactly you mean by [question]? I’m not sure I fully understand.”
- “I’m afraid I don’t have the exact figures at hand, but if you give me your email address at the end, I can follow up with you later.”
- “Does that answer your question?”
- “I hope that makes sense. Is that the kind of answer you were looking for?”
Learning new English words is not easy, but you can achieve effective communication through practice and repetition. If you are a Edulo student, visit the Library to practice your vocabulary for presentations. If you are not part of the Edulo community yet, learn how we can help you here.
