How to formulate precise goals
At the beginning of any planning should be the point to formulate specific goals. Only if you yourself know exactly what you want to achieve with your presentation can you formulate the appropriate messages for your audience accurately and understandably.
A presentation is ultimately an attempt to increase the impact of one’s own messages by deliberately structuring and preparing information in order to achieve certain goals. The individual information results from the selection of the audience and your own motives. You want to achieve specific results with a specific target group. In addition to the content of the presentation, it is always about the speaker himself, who with his appearance pursues the goal of building trust, attribution of competence and sympathy with the audience. Another basis are the goals “inform” and/or “convince”. Only if you yourself know what you are actually aiming at, you can prepare the course of your presentation reasonably. The more precisely you define what you want your audience to think, know, or do at the end of your presentation, the more precisely you can include appropriate information. As little as possible should be lost on the way from the transmitter to the receiver. What beliefs or feeling do you want to convey? If you want your audience to do something specific after the previous day ends, you need to think carefully about how you’re going to accomplish that. When there is clarity about the desired outcome, data and facts can be gathered that are useful in achieving the goal. Remember that creating emotion is an important element of a compelling presentation.
For example, if you want to sell a product with your presentation, defining the goal as “I want everyone to be excited about my product” is not enough. Work out in advance exactly what sales success you want to achieve through which information.
Important questions in advance of your planning:
– What do I want to achieve with my presentation?
– What additional knowledge do I want my audience to have at the end of the presentation?
– What should my audience ideally do after the presentation?
– What specifically do I want to change in my audience’s perspective as a result of my presentation?
– What emotions would I like to evoke in my audience?
From the information collected, all data must be sorted by importance for achieving the goal:
– Tailoring the presentation to the target group (e.g. using the presentation booster method with the help of the motif chart)
– Key statements on which are indispensable
– Important statements that additionally underline the topic
– Interesting statements that add further aspects to the topic
– Background material that further substantiates own statements
– Examples, quotes, gags and practical examples that further illustrate the topic.
Information and persuasion presentations
The professional literature (see also the book “Best Business Presentations” by Matthias Garten) distinguishes between two different types of presentations.
The information presentations are presented facts. It is about topics
– get to know,
– to understand,
– to discuss.
The persuasive presentations are designed to convince the audience. It’s about choosing a possibility,
– a product or
– to buy a service,
– Support a cause or a commitment.
But in the end, every presentation is actually designed to convince the audience. Even a status report must be convincingly designed to prevent critical questions from arising in the first place. The one who always has to convince anyway is the speaker himself. You can gather all the relevant content with the greatest diligence – if you are not able to present your results convincingly, the audience will not follow you. But that’s another topic you’ll find more articles and events on here on the blog.
Dipl.-Wirtsch.-Informatiker Matthias Garten is the expert for multimedia presentations. He is an entrepreneur, speaker (TOP 100 Speaker), trainer (TOP 100 Excellence Trainer), multiple book author, presentation coach, member of the GSA and Club 55, organizer of the Presentation Conference and the Presentation Bootcamp. In addition to PowerPoint and presentation training, he inspires and advises companies to present themselves even more effectively and thus stand out from competitors. He is the business owner of the presentation agency smavicon Best Business Presentations and has created over 10,000 presentations for over 150 industries with his team since 1993.
