19 Steps to Optimize Presentations

12 أبريل 2025

For the presentation to achieve its desired goals successfully, you should show enthusiasm and high self-confidence and speak naturally and spontaneously.

This success is closely related to the delivery and presentation style, not just the ideas and content presented. So, this article presents a set of steps that ensure your presentation's success.

Effective Presentation

Here are four goals you should focus on while preparing your presentation:

Maintaining the audience's attention and focus.
Clarifying ideas for the audience.
Stimulating the audience's imagination.
Convincing the audience of the presented information and ideas.

Achieving these goals requires a set of elements, primarily using an engaging presentation method that captures the audience's attention and involvement, along with preparing valuable content that provides the audience with the information they need. Neglecting any of these factors can lead to the presentation's failure to achieve its goals.

How to Prepare Effective Presentations?

A professional speaker spends long hours preparing presentations and practicing their delivery. Here are 19 steps to optimize presentation:

1. Simplify the Content

You should get straight to the point and present clear, concise, and easily understandable information. This step is crucial because a complex presentation or one that presents a huge amount of information can confuse the audience and prevent them from understanding the content.

The presentation should include no more than three key points mentioned at the beginning of the session before elaborating on each one in detail. At the end of the presentation, the audience should be reminded of these points again.

Try to avoid filler content and information that does not serve the presentation's purpose. Also, avoid overusing statistics and complex terminology.

2. Connect with the Audience

Speakers often struggle to connect with their audience, which lowers audience participation and interaction.

A skilled speaker can connect with the audience, encouraging them to listen, participate, and engage with the content.

3. Maintain Good Eye Contact and Smile

A speaker appears unconfident when avoiding eye contact with the audience. Eye contact helps build rapport with the audience, giving each individual the impression that you are speaking directly to them. However, some speakers find it challenging to maintain eye contact. In such cases, looking directly at the audience's foreheads is best, as this gives the same impression of eye contact.

Try to make eye contact with all attendees, but avoid glancing from one person to another too quickly, as this implies that you are nervous or confused.

Also, smiling helps build rapport and reduce the speaker's tension, but you should ensure that the room's lighting lets attendees see your facial expressions clearly.

4. Focus on Body Language Cues

Here are 8 steps to leverage body language movements to optimize your presentation:

Adopt open-body postures and avoid closed movements, such as crossing your arms.
Match your facial expressions with the presented ideas.
Avoid tension or restlessness cues, such as unnecessarily moving your feet back and forth.
Keep your eyes on the audience, but feel free to scan slides or information as needed throughout the presentation quickly.
Moderately use hand gestures to highlight the presented ideas. While avoiding hand gestures can make the speaker appear confused and embarrassed, overusing them can demonstrate the speaker's tension and distract the audience.
Vary body language cues to increase vitality.
Maintain an upright posture.
Be aware of cultural differences.

5. Move Within the Hall

Avoid standing behind the computer screen and podium as much as possible to reduce distance and eliminate barriers between you and the audience. You can move around the hall to stimulate participants' attention and engagement with the presentation.

Here are 5 steps for applying movement during presentations:

Take the stage's center to deliver the introduction
Move to the stage's left side when presenting the first point.
Move back to the stage's center to discuss the second point.
Move to the stage's right side to explain the third point.
Present the conclusion from the center.

Moving in front of the audience and between rows is advisable to increase interaction and engagement.

6. Speak with the Audience

You can conduct a poll or ask questions to encourage them to think and increase their participation and engagement with the presentation. Here are 3 different question types:

Direct questions.
Rhetorical questions.
Loaded questions.

6.1. Direct Questions

Direct questions aim to stimulate thought and require answers. Examples include: "What would you do in such a situation?"

You can pass the mic among attendees to get their answers.

6.2. Rhetorical Questions

Rhetorical questions are used to highlight a prior idea rather than to elicit an answer.

6.3. Loaded Questions

These questions present assumptions intended to lead the audience toward a particular answer, which the speaker then corrects to prove their point. For example, you might ask: "What accounts for the low prevalence of mental health issues in your organisations?"

Attendees will likely confirm in their responses that they are happy in their jobs and do not experience any mental stress.

After receiving audience responses, you might say: "These low rates are attributed to employees feeling embarrassed and unprepared to acknowledge their mental disorders and their need for necessary medical assistance to overcome workplace challenges."

7. Address Each Audience Member Individually

By using second-person pronouns like " you," you should make the audience feel that you are speaking directly to each of them.

For example, you could ask, "Do you want to lose weight without feeling hungry?" instead of, "Does anyone want to lose weight without suffering from strict diet hunger?"

Using collective pronouns like "we" and "us" can boost attendees' sense of involvement and community.

8. Adapt to Audience Response

You should be prepared to change your presentation style according to the audience's responses and their comprehension level. It's best to skip some extra details and deliver the content faster if the audience starts to fidget.

Conversely, you may need to provide more illustrative examples if the audience struggles to understand a particular idea. You may have to improvise sometimes because you cannot predict all the session's dynamics.

9. Master Vocal Variety Skills

How you present an idea and your speaking style is equally important to the content.

The audience enjoys the presentation when the speaker discusses the topic enthusiastically and passionately. In contrast, they become restless and lose interest when the delivery style is emotionless and rigid, even if the presentation points are valuable and comprehensive.

Here are 7 tips for applying vocal variety techniques:

Adjust your tone of voice to match the presented ideas. You should raise your voice to highlight a point and lower it to emphasize it. You can also use your voice to express your emotions.
Prevent speaking in an emotionless, monotonous tone to keep the audience interested in the subject.
Give yourself enough time to speak clearly and understandably for the listeners.
Raise your voice when asking questions and lower it when necessary to express seriousness and confidence in your words.
Show your enthusiasm and interest in the presentation topic to encourage attendees to listen and maintain their attention throughout the session. Smiling and increasing your speaking pace can help convey your excitement about the topic.
Speak loudly and clearly so that your voice reaches the back rows.
Modify your speaking pace to allow listeners to follow you comfortably and calmly. If you speak too quickly or too slowly, the audience will find it difficult to absorb and understand information. Vocal variety conveys ideas. Speeding up your speech emphasizes points while slowing down indicates caution and careful consideration.

Ensure to warm up your vocal cords before the presentation by following these steps:

Read aloud from a book that calls for vocal variety techniques, like children's stories.
Avoid dairy products or sugary drinks before the presentation as they increase mucus production in the throat.
Avoid consuming cold beverages right before the presentation as they can constrict the throat, affecting sound quality.
Drinking a cup of warm tea before the presentation is advised as it eases throat tension.

10. Develop Presentation Skills

You should develop your presentation and public speaking skills by practicing in real environments that allow you to receive feedback assessing your performance.

11. Control Your Breathing Rate

Anxiety can lead to breath shortness and increased rate, making it harder to control your voice and feel relaxed during the presentation. So, you should take several deep, steady breaths before starting the presentation.

"Breath control" is a popular technique that helps you slow your breathing rate back to normal levels to reduce anxiety.

Here are 5 tips for applying breath control techniques:

Maintain a straight posture to facilitate deep breathing and oxygenation of the lungs.
Inhale through your nose and hold your breath for 4 seconds.
Hold your breath for 2 seconds.
Exhale through your nose for 6 seconds.
Wait a few seconds before repeating the breathing process.

Mastering this technique requires some practice, and you will witness its benefits and want to apply it right before delivering presentations.

During your presentation, you may notice that you are speaking too quickly. That's when you should pause briefly and take a few deep breaths. The audience will think you are contemplating your words, and your behavior will not seem strange at all. You can pre-determine the pauses' timing after asking questions or at the end of each point. This will allow you to take a break and give the audience a chance to process the information.

Also, these pauses help you avoid using filler words that do not serve the content and highlight your confusion and unconference.

12. Use Strong Openings to Capture the Audience's Attention

You should invest your presentation's first few minutes in stimulating audience interaction, engagement, and interest in the topic. This can be achieved by telling a story that illustrates the importance of the presentation topic.

For example, if the presentation is about the advantages of pet ownership for mental and physical health, you could share a story or study about someone who experienced an improvement in their quality of life after adopting a pet. The audience tends to connect more with these examples than with statistics and scientific facts.

13. Sense of Humor

A confident and skilled speaker uses humor during presentations to stimulate audience interaction and interest by making them laugh. However, jokes should be chosen carefully to avoid misunderstandings or inadvertently offending any audience members or groups.

Applying this technique requires skills and experience in delivering jokes, having previous successful experiences, and selecting an appropriate joke for the topic when the circumstances are right.

14. Storytelling

Try to tell stories as much as possible, especially if your personal experiences inspire them. The audience enjoys learning about the speaker's life details.

You could share a story about a past mistake or a difficult situation that serves the presentation's topic and goal. Attendees relate to these stories because they are common experiences that many people encounter daily.

You can humorously tell the story to increase your comfort. Misunderstandings or unintentional offenses are rare when sharing personal experiences humorously because you are speaking about yourself.

Storytelling captures the audience's interest and maintains their engagement with the material, making it a highly effective opening and transitional technique in presentations.

15. Focus on Audience Needs

You should provide the audience with information, tips, plans, and useful tools that help them meet their needs and achieve their goals. A speaker earns the audience's trust and goodwill by providing valuable information they need in their lives.

Furthermore, you can address the audience's challenges by asking questions like, "Are you struggling to stick to healthy diets?"

These questions raise audience interest and engagement with the content as they seek solutions and suggestions to help them overcome challenges and achieve their goals.

16. Use Visual Elements

Visual elements include graphs, photographs, and videos, which are used to clarify further and explain theoretical information.

Here are 9 objectives for using visual elements:

Summarize information.
Minimize the amount of spoken information. Rather than reading the results, you could present a graph to compare them.
Present illustrative examples.
Evoke emotions in the audience, but you should determine the desired emotion in advance while preparing the presentation.
Highlight a particular concept.
Present information in a way that allows attendees to retain and consolidate it in the long term.
Establish your credibility.
Encourage audience interaction and engagement with the content, maintaining their interest and focus.
Simplify information so that attendees can easily understand it.

Here are 10 tips for using visual elements:

Use visual elements that enrich the content and clarify its purpose.
Use visual elements that align with the presented ideas to avoid confusing the audience.
Avoid placing too many visual elements on one slide so that the audience can understand the content.
Choose clear, concise, and high-quality visual elements.
Keep style uniform by standardizing image placement, color scheme, and font size.
Present data and results using graphs and charts
Present visual elements after introducing concepts to avoid distracting the audience between reading charts and hearing explanations simultaneously.
Use each visual element to explain one idea.
Use visual elements sparingly. They are an additional tool to clarify ideas and enrich content.
Ensure that the presentation stands alone without visual elements in case of technical problems that may occur during the presentation.

17. Apply the 10-20-30 Slideshow Rule

Slideshows are widely used because they are an easy way to create professional presentations that capture the audience's attention. Author and entrepreneur Guy Kawasaki recommends applying the 10-20-30 Slideshows Rule, which requires the following conditions:

Consider the audience's capacity and create a maximum of 10 slides. People rarely absorb more than 10 slides, so don't overburden attendees with information they don't need.
The slideshow should not take more than 20 minutes to allow enough time for questions and discussions.
Increase the font size to at least 30 because the audience reads the information from the display screen while the speaker explains. Enlarging the font helps them finish reading the content quickly before the speaker starts explaining, which helps them maintain their focus.

You can provide the audience with additional information by distributing handouts at the end of the presentation.

18. Drink Enough Water

Consume adequate fluids while on stage, preferably drinking room-temperature water. Fluids help maintain the quality of your voice, and you can use drinking water as an excuse to pause and reorganize your thoughts.

19. Practice

When a speaker is knowledgeable about the subject matter they are presenting, it is evident that they are confident in both themselves and the information they have to offer. This helps to persuade the audience of the content's value.

Developing Presentation Skills

You can improve your presentation and public speaking skills through practice in real-life environments that allow you to receive feedback on your performance. Here are 7 steps to develop presentation skills:

Practice delivering the presentation while transitioning between slides and topics and using visual elements.
Stand up, give the presentation out loud, and interact with the audience as if they were real.
Practice body language cues and gestures.
Use "virtual reality" (VR) for training on slide presentations.
Present in front of others and hear their feedback.
Improvise ideas and examples during the presentation to appear spontaneous and natural. Avoid memorizing the presentation verbatim so you don’t look as stiff or lose focus and forget the points you intend to cover.
Write down the key points with some brief notes (in order) on a paper card to refer to as needed during the presentation.

In Conclusion

The article presents a set of steps that optimize the presentation. You can try them out yourself, choose what suits you, and make the necessary adjustments. The presentation's success largely depends on your comfort and confidence while delivering it.