We will tell you why visual communication is important in business and how presentations influence decision making
Employee training programs are becoming more and more popular. A common question asked by corporate training professionals is how to teach employees how to work better with presentations?
After all, you need to be able to use advanced processing and visualization tools such as the online slots directory, as well as speak confidently at the same time. At the same time, not all managers understand the need to develop “soft” skills in employees, especially in the narrow area of creating presentations.
It would seem, what is difficult in preparing the slides? And will the money spent on training in this direction pay off? We will tell you why your employees need to be able to make presentations and how it will benefit your business.
Presentation Is the Language of Modern Business
Presentation is the only generally accepted language of business communication worldwide. It does not matter what kind of meeting we are talking about: presentations are used by everyone – from small companies to top officials of the state. Unsurprisingly, the presentation format is often criticized: Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos even banned the use of presentations in meetings, which allegedly increased the effectiveness of such meetings by a quarter. However, most of the global business community is used to relying on slides and does not plan to abandon them. For example, according to BBC statistics, tens of millions of PowerPoint presentations are created every day in the world.
Visuality as a trend
A modern man more readily consumes visual information than textual information. If it seems to you that this is a new trend that has not yet had enough time to influence the world, you are mistaken. Scientists talked about people’s preference for visual symbols over text ones already 10 years ago; now the so-called clip thinking is a reality for anyone who has a smartphone. The presentation has every chance of being attractive to listeners because it is the embodiment of clip culture – it is characterized by reliance on visual images, switching pictures.
Order in the Presentation – Order in the Head
The process of creating a presentation is an opportunity to once again structure your thoughts. For example, to implement the well-known principle of “one idea, one slide”, you need to clearly understand the structure of the information that you are presenting. When preparing your presentation, you will have to take another critical look at key aspects of the business, for example, remember what your target audience is and what decision it should make as a result of your actions. Indeed, for different segments of the target audience, you will have to prepare different presentations.
What segment of target audience does my audience belong to? Do I have a strategy for working with this segment or do I need to invent one? Share your presentation or show it in a meeting? What should I change in the document to achieve each of these goals? The answers to these questions will provide insights that are useful not only for your presentation, but also for the future development of your business.
Speaking Skills Help Business
An additional positive effect of the development of presentation skills can be considered the personal growth of employees. The skill of “effective communication”, that is, the ability to competently conduct a discussion and speak convincingly, is considered essential for those who work with clients. But in fact, the knowledge gained in the courses on the art of speaking will be useful for designers, marketers, and developers alike. Speaking skills help business04 They not only learn to improvise in difficult situations but also remain confident in tense negotiations, voice unpopular decisions, and get rid of the fear of the public.
Why Learn How to Create Awesome Presentations
In vacancies in large companies, you can often see a requirement – the skill of creating presentations. Business is looking for people who know how to work with information and present it convincingly. By learning how to create presentations, you become a more attractive candidate for employers. Making presentations is a complex task: you master the skills of design, information processing, and structured thinking at the same time.
Why should a business owner invest in developing presentation skills in their employees? Presentation is the most relevant communication tool in business. Good presentations allow you to convey the right messages to customers and partners, which ultimately leads to successful deals.
5 Tips to Make Your Presentation Design Better
Use More Images
- Photos on the slide confirm the information, it is perceived and remembered several times better than ordinary text. Use visuals to cut down on the text and try to explain your idea without words.
- Use only high quality images. Look for pictures in HD quality with a resolution of at least 720p (1280×720).
- Do not download banal pictures from search engines and photo stocks. Businessmen shaking hands, women in the bathroom, smiling at a salad, a mountain climber and other clichés look insincere and cheap. Look for live footage showing real life and real people. Such illustrations are much more honest and more credible.
Decide on the Color Scheme
Good design should be discreet and consistent. To make your work feel like a coherent project, use the same set of colors in your slides. Choose a few primary colors (preferably no more than two) and a few accent colors. Avoid random colors and unexpected color transitions. The color should attract, but not distract from the main thing – the content.
- Color palette generators
These services allow you to quickly find color combinations for your project. Service like Coolors generates 5 colors, pressing the space bar reveals a new combination. The color you like can be fixed by clicking on the lock, and you can also adjust its shade.
Generators allow you to quickly get interesting color combinations and determine the style of your presentation. However, they may not be very convenient when you need to work with a palette of certain colors – for example, to collect a gamut of red shades.
- Create a palette from a photo
One of the simplest ways to pick a color palette is to pick out the primary colors from a suitable photograph. You can do this manually using the eyedropper tool in PowerPoint, or use a special service, for example, Color palette FX.
This approach allows you to get the most vivid and vibrant colors, and this is its advantage. The palette will look natural and organic.
- Corporate identity of the company
If you are preparing a presentation for a company, it is logical to use elements of its corporate identity. The main and additional corporate colors, as well as the rules for their use, are usually indicated in brand books.
If the company does not have a brand book, search the Internet for its logo, take a screenshot of the official web page and transfer it to PowerPoint. Select the main colors of the logo and website using the eyedropper tool and add them to the presentation template.
This approach will help you save time choosing colors and make it easy to adhere to the company’s corporate identity.
Choose Fonts for Your Project
- Particular attention should be paid to typography. Correctly selected fonts and customized layouts will make the project visually more elaborate, high-quality and elegant. What’s more, the job of good typography is to make the text easy to read. This directly affects how well your audience will perceive the material.
- The main tip for choosing fonts is the same as for choosing colors: strive for uniformity, do not use more than two different font families in the same project.
- Use serif fonts only when you need to – when you want to create an interesting font pair or underline a heading. In all other cases, use sans-serif fonts – they are more versatile and easier to read on screens and projectors.
Use Icons
Icons are great for diluting information and decorating a slide. Sometimes they can replace text, which saves space on the slide and builds a more interesting composition.
And icons also speed up the perception of information, as they are read faster than text and help focus on key points.
Check the Quality of the Layout and Alignment
- Always use alignment and distribution tools – don’t place items “by eye”.
- Your presentation should look neat and clean. It will look sloppy and unprofessional if the elements are not aligned, the padding on each slide is different, and the same type of elements change in size. Pay attention to the layout – think about how best to arrange the elements on the slide so that the information is easy to read and there is enough free space.
We hope this article has convinced you that this is very important knowledge for each employee, which will certainly be useful both for the development of your business and will help them in the future in the next position.
