That's the magic formula!
Here are some more tactical ideas to consider when delivering a presentation:
1. Audience - You want to speak or display content that speaks to the vernacular/lingo or vocabulary level of your audience. Nothing allows an audience member to feel more part of your presentation than to use the language they use every day. Nothing isolates an audience more than to speak well over or under their intelligence level or business perspective.
2. Branded Templates - If you are representing your company, use the company approved templates, not something you feel looks nice or cute. It's always best to represent your company first rather than your self interest. Also, if your audience is a room full of clients from a single company, perhaps co-branding the presentation is in order. This gives the sense that the speaker/presenter is "one of us" from the audience perspective. *It is important to note that you must have permission to use other company logos and there may be strict rules on how their logos or brand is displayed. Also the content of the presentation may need to be footnoted with proprietary, confidential or some other derivation of ownership; check with a legal department if available.
3. Formatting - Take care in utilizing the same font, tabs or bullet structure throughout the entire presentation. This provides visual continuity and allows a participant to focus more on the meaning of your presentation rather than digesting the cognitive distractions in a continual moving target of title centering, heading boldness, bullet indents and sub-bullet icon discrepancies.
4. Light heartedness/humor - Be very careful here. This treads along the lines of talking politics or religion at a dinner party. Regardless of audience, generally speaking, too much humor can sabotage the intent of your presentation, so use it sparingly, if at all. The goal of a presentation is to get your point across with credibility, convince your audience of a particular point, or sell a product or service. Too much humor may send the message that you are not to be taken seriously.
5. Animation - this is along the same lines as point #4. Too much visual interaction via fly in from the left, camera shudder bullet points, sound effects, star wipes, etc. can be distracting. If you must have an effect, pick one style and stick with it throughout the entire presentation. Watch your presentation through on a timer start to finish and see if it becomes tiresome or distracting. Chances are high that no one will be more impressed by your powerpoint skills versus your ability to present meaningful content and motivate a call to action.
6. On the screen versus "out of your mouth" - Here the standard 80/20 rule should apply*. 20% of what you say should be on the screen the other 80% should come out of your mouth, otherwise, why are you even there? Value your personal contribution to the meaning and detail of higher level bullet points.
* If you are handing your presentation over to someone or an audience to be read and learned, use the speaker notes to fulfill the total package concept, not within the slide itself.
7. Length - Be respectful of the time you have with your captive audience. If you know you have only 1 hour to present, give yourself about 50- 55 minutes to cover the material and leave the remaining time for questions. If your presentation is a success, the audience members will be at the ready to ask for more of your time at a subsequent meeting time. This is a good thing! When your audience wants to hear more from you, you've done your job well, in fact so well, they want more!
8. Basic Structure - Outline what you are going to tell them, tell them, then at the end review what you've told them. A consistent message will always have a better chance of leaving the desired impression than a scattered concept that leaves your audience confused as to what they just heard.
Good luck and break a leg!
