How to Improve Your Public Speaking

We’re a bunch of goal junkies at Digital Spark Marketing but we’re realists in that we can only focus on so many goals. For 2022, we’d like to challenge our clients, readers, and friends on becoming the best public speaking presenters they can be. Instead of creating a long list of resolutions for 2022, we narrowed our focus to just four.

Here are the four public speaking goals we recommend every presenter should make:

Rehearse a minimum of 3 times before you deliver your presentation: 

When rehearsing your presentation, rehearse in front of an audience or in front of a camera to watch yourself.

Criteria to judge yourself on include:

  1. Body Language – Are you doing anything that is distracting to the audience? Are you able to keep your legs positioned shoulder-width, arms open, and hands moving with a smile?
  2. Purpose– If you were in the audience’s shoes, is it easy to watch yourself and understand what you are asking for?
  3. Jargon – Are you using words or acronyms that can be confusing to the audience?
  4. Pace– Are you speaking too fast where it’s hard to understand? Can you pause at certain points to help emphasize points?
  5. Flow– Do you tend to ramble and go on a tangent in certain parts of your presentation?
  6. Reliability: Can you present this presentation without a presentation? If AV ever crashes on you, will you be ready?

Simplify your points and data: 

  1. It’s very important to deliver stats that are relatable to the audience. The example we love to use is when Steve Jobs stated, “The Apple iPod has 10GB and that’s 2,000 songs.” This is a basic example of how data should be delivered. Presenters should consider their audience’s needs, and deliver the stats in a way the average person can apply the information. This will help the audience consume the data points in a more impactful way.
  2. Showcasing a compare and contrast stat such as, “In 2015, the top performing trailers from each nominee have collectively been watched over 200 million minutes on YouTube —that’s over 3.3 million hours, or the equivalent of nearly a million Oscar telecasts.”
  3. Or a decreasing value size vs. an increasing value size such as “This will cost 4 trillion dollars to execute, or 11 billion dollars a day.” This provides association points to showcase the scope of the number.
  4. Bonus takeaway:When a presentation requires you to showcase a lot of data on slides, organize your slides to ONE graph to be the main focus per slide. You can either break down the chart-heavy graphs into multiple slides or feature a transition that can unveil graphs as you talk about it through clicks.

Create powerful calls to action: 

Segment your points into a structure an audience can follow along with while also including a call to action that can move the audience. Without a call to action, there is no strong action the audience feels that they need to take. There are three different types of calls to action that include: the ask, question, or demand.

Always, always create a Big Idea for a presentation: 

Before even considering design or delivery rehearsal, always establish a big idea for your presentation. A big idea is the central argument or theme of your entire presentation. It should be something that others really care about. Encourage your team to be able to state their big idea in concrete, but simplistic terms. You can read more about building big ideas for presentations here.

In order to create great presentations, it obviously takes practice. You know that. However, organize the above points into a process that you can easily adapt into habits. For example, why don’t you create a checklist you always follow before you give a presentation?

The bottom line

My presentation is ready to be delivered when:

  1. I can deliver my presentation without the slideshow
  2. I have rehearsed a minimum of three times
  3. I can simplify any data point in the presentation that may be confusing into something simple and relatable to the audience
  4. I know exactly what I am looking for my audience to do through my call to action
  5. I know exactly in one sentence the main argument I’d like my audience to remember about my presentation.

While it doesn’t have to look exactly like the above checklist, having a great mental note or print out near your desk right before your next presentation can make a world of difference.

How to Improve Your Public Speaking
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