How to Improve Your Presentation Skills

How to Improve Your Presentation Skills

TRAINER: OK Laura, so what I’d like you to do now is do a short presentation, just a little sound bite, maybe 30, 40 seconds. I think you’re going to do it about something related to marketing, is that right?

LAURA: I work in search engine marketing. I make sure that the website for the company goes really high up in things like Google because it’s really important, eh, for the company to be seen by lots of people because then people will buy stuff. It’s really important and so I do things like making sure there are lots of keywords on the page, and making sure there’s no duplication between pages, and there are lots of things that you can do and it’s really important, um, and yep, that’s it.

TRAINER: OK Laura, thanks very much for that. That was fantastic. So what I’m going to do is give you a bit of feedback now and then I’m going to ask you in a moment just to do it again with some improvements. First thing to say is that I think the content was fantastic. If you saw that written down, it would sound tremendous. You said all the right things, but I think there’s maybe some ways in the delivery we could get that across a little bit more. You just look a little bit kind of uncomfortable, as if you don’t really care about what you’re talking about. So I think perhaps as you look at the camera just be a bit more excited about it and just imagine that you’re not just trying to get some information across but you’re trying to get, fire people’s imaginations when you do it. So, just look into the audience and just project it a little bit more. Let the hands come up. So I think this is as much a mindset thing as a body thing. Once you start to do that, I think you’ll find it so much more engaging. So don’t change the content, but it’s the delivery that needs to be improved. Do you want to have a go at that?

LAURA: Imagine life without search engines. A few years ago, they wouldn’t even have existed, and we didn’t know what they were, but now there an essential tool for all consumers to find what they’re looking for. That’s why it’s really, really vital for all companies to invest in search engine marketing and search engine optimization. There are a few key tips for how you can make sure that your website is really high up in the search engines and that you’re therefore found by anybody that wants to buy your product. For example, you need to make sure that the relevant keywords are really high on the page. This means that the search engines can find the relevant pages for the person that’s looking. You also need to make sure that your content is fresh, and that it’s renewed regularly, and that it isn’t duplicated between several pages. Those are just a few tips to get you started.

TRAINER: Laura, that was great. You really projected your personality there. One of the things we’ve talked about is that the audience would tend to feel what you feel, so you’re kind of in charge of their emotional state and you projected positive energy and that’s what—as you look at the audience, you can see how they were responding to you. And a lot of other things happened—your hands came out, you had a smile on your face. And even the content change, which it often does when you’re doing that. You were so much more positive, you were selling the benefits. So it’s just that one small change about how you feel about what it is you’re talking about that makes a very big difference to the impact that you can have and the influence you will have over your audience, and I thought that was absolutely fantastic.