It doesn’t matter if the presentation you’re giving will span five minutes or a full day. If you don’t factor in these four components – time, goals, focus, and texture – it won’t be effective. Together, they are the secret to delivering successful presentations.

What do I mean by successful presentations? The kind where people are engaged and pay attention. And the kind that make a positive impression on any size audience, so your messages get heard and understood.

These four components are the same for ANY type of presentation – marketing ideas, sales pitches, financial performance results, training workshops, status updates, plan/recommendations, investor pitches, onboarding orientations, and even keynote presentations.

You may be surprised to learn that “exciting content” isn’t one of the components. Your subject matter could be dry and boring, and you can STILL engage people and make an impression.

That’s because the secret to engaging an audience isn’t in the content…it’s in the delivery.

Yes, the content has to be relevant to your audience, even if it’s dry. But the impression you make is shaped by your delivery choices, which, in turn, are shaped by the four components.

TIME

“How much time do I have?” should always be your FIRST question when you’re asked to give a presentation of any kind.

Time parameters dictate the quantity of content you can include. And you’ve got to be militant in understanding just how much time you will actually have or you’ll make unwise choices about what to include.

For example, say a client or your boss gives you 30 minutes to present your ideas. A 30-minute slot on a calendar does not equal a 30-minute presentation. The first five minutes of the meeting might be chit chat, settling in, and waiting for someone’s late arrival. Then you’ll need time for questions and discussion, whether that happens during the presentation or afterward. So let’s say you think there will be a lot to discuss and you want to save half of the meeting slot (in this case, 15 minutes) to allow for that.  That means your actual presentation can only be 10 minutes long.

There is a HUGE difference between choosing content to fill 30 minutes vs. 10 minutes. In this example, if you had 30 minutes, you might choose to include your research journey and supporting data for all your ideas. But with 10? You might just have to deliver the ideas alone, in order to have enough time to do them justice.

Knowing the actual amount of time is also helpful because you’ll be able to see in advance whether the allotted time is enough for what’s needed. Maybe in this example, sharing the research journey is essential to understanding each idea, and therefore 10 minutes simply isn’t enough time communicate all the information necessary. That’s your cue to suggest that an hour be blocked instead of 30 minutes.

In another example, think about a keynote or other type of stage-based presentation to a large audience. For one of my most recent keynote presentations, I was given a 45-minute time slot. But in my analysis of content choices as I was creating the presentation, I came up with this breakdown of timing anchors:

• Five minutes had to be saved for everyone coming in and getting settled, because these sessions at big tourism conferences rarely start on time.
• I was showing five total minutes of video content throughout the presentation.
• I always ask questions and engage in audience banter/interactions during my presentations, even hopping off the stage if appropriate, and walking out onto the floor. So I saved 10 minutes for that.
• 15 minutes would be needed to deliver actual technical content critical to the educational mission of the session. This stuff already existed, it was just up to me to organize and present it.

So in reality, I actually only had 10 minutes to fill with my own original content – examples, ideas, stories, and so on. Knowing that, I was able to choose the right number of stories and examples to make the most of that 10 minutes. Without it, I would certainly have chosen too many and run out of time.

Listen, no one ever gets mad if you finish a presentation early. But it’s super frustrating for the audience when you run out of time. Because you end up either 1) talking too fast to cram it all in; 2) leaving some content unpresented; or 3) forcing them to stay overtime until you finish. All three of those paths leave a negative impression on your audience, resulting in an unsuccessful presentation.

GOALS

This sounds elementary but most people don’t think through this crucial factor. The goals aren’t the same as the content choices, but rather they INFORM the content choices. The goals answer the question: what do you want the end result of this presentation to be?

In the first example above, your goal might be to get approval on the ideas. Or it could simply be to get feedback on them. But you might have other goals as well, such as:

• Making a case for an increased budget or new hire.
• Defending your job.
• Laying the groundwork to ask for a raise or promotion.
• Getting credit for your department’s good work.

In that example, if you’ve only got 10 minutes to fill with content…do you see how your content choices might change depending on which goals you’re trying to achieve? Each one of those goals has a slightly different slant.

Knowing your goals allows you to wisely choose which content to emphasize and what gets the most/least airtime.

Years ago, I was asked by organizers to use my keynote session to infuse joy into a tourism conference that needed a refreshed vibe. That was it…their one goal. They didn’t even assign me a topic.

That one goal led me to choose a topic – The Magic of Surprise in Guest Services – and all the elements needed to achieve that goal. Did this include surprising the audience with beer, snacks, fashion accessories, and an eight-piece jazz band during the presentation? Indeed it did. Watch a snippet here.

If their goal had been “educate the audience on the latest changes in social media marketing,” I would have made COMPLETELY different content choices. A jazz band, while fun, would have been unnecessary and squandered time away from achieving the goal.

FOCUS

Once you know “time” and “goals,” you use them to choose your presentation’s focus. What content needs the most emphasis? And how deeply should you cover each piece of content?

In the first example above, let’s say your two goals are to get feedback on the ideas and showcase your team’s limitless creativity. It might be best to use that 10 minutes to cover as many ideas as possible with just top-level highlights about each one.

But if your goal is to get approval on some or all of the ideas, it might be wiser to choose the top three most viable ideas and cover each one deeply. You can always mention (if appropriate) that there are 10 more ideas in the hopper but “these rose to the top” for whatever reason.

Focus is probably the most critical component in delivering successful presentations. Deciding on your presentation’s focus is all about curating the content. And that means choosing what gets included and, as importantly, what gets omitted.

It can be painful to leave content out of your presentation when you really really really want to include it. But if that piece of content doesn’t align well with your time and goals, no matter how much you love it, it will actually do more harm than good to include it.

A favorite piece of advice I got years ago about the importance of brevity in communication is “overwriting is just a failure to make choices.” This is true also with delivering successful presentations. Choose your focus wisely and your audience will stay engaged.

TEXTURE

Ah, here’s the secret sauce to audience engagement.

It’s a given that with any presentation, there’s the potential to lose the audience’s attention to daydreaming, their mobile device, private troubles, a desire to be elsewhere, and even just a need to go to the bathroom.

Texture – which is what I call doing unexpected things and breaking patterns – is the best way to combat that.

Texture is anything that snaps people out of their thoughts and back into what you’re saying. There’s no formula for infusing texture into a presentation…in fact, the unexpected element of it is what makes it so successful. And it has to be natural to the presenter. For example, *I* may choose to hop off the stage and head out into the audience for interactive banter during a presentation, but that may feel weird for other presenters.

What you choose to use for texture will depend on your own style/comfort level with your presentation, audience size, your relationship with the audience and how well you know each other, subject matter, and amount of time available. Handing out prizes/gifts, stopping to talk to one particular audience member, showing an unexpected picture, singing a song, making everyone get up and switch seats, calling up a volunteer, asking the audience an impromptu question and giving an answer…ANYTHING to break the monotony of you-talking-and-them-listening. THAT is texture.

Here’s me, trying to decide what kind of “texture” to serve the audience.

In a small setting, like the first example above, that might mean bringing cookies from your favorite bakery or snacks/drinks you know the client/boss really likes. Or it could mean bringing in props or accessories that make the presentation interactive and bring the ideas to life.

In a larger setting, you likely can’t see all the audience members. So those folks in the back can easily be scrolling on their phones and answering emails without you knowing. But the minute you call up a volunteer, or hop off the stage, or do a little dance, or show an unexpected photo that gets an audible response from the whole audience? Trust me, those strayers will come right back to you.

I once gave a three-hour long workshop on crisis communications response for the members of a tourism region. The heavy subject, necessarily unpleasant examples, and scary nature of the content – coupled with the fact that the audience was mandated to be there – was a recipe for low attention spans. Some texture I used to combat that:

• After presenting each super-heavy case study – which included examples of natural disasters, violent crime, epidemics, and more – I showed a pleasant “palate cleanser” photo of a cute dog doing something…yawning, leaping, sleeping, etc. And I called it just that: a necessary brain palate cleanser, because it’s important to protect your state of mind when dealing with a tragic crisis. We all took a moment to “awwww” over each dog before we collectively pulled up our bootstraps and dove into the next gut-wrenching case study.
• I created an activity for each table to do together and instead of handing out pencils and paper, I handed out crayons and construction paper for recording their ideas. Just adding these pops of color to the environment gave people a lift, because it was fun and different. I also encouraged folks to doodle, collected one from each table, and awarded prizes to the top three at the end of the presentation.
• Twice I asked for a volunteer to come up and help me do something. In one case, I handed the guy my “clicker” to advance my slides on cue and it created much levity in the room when we had some snags in coordinating the timing.

Did some people’s attention drift at times? Sure, they’re human. But did I get them back with each infusion of texture? You betcha.

Again, texture examples like those in particular may not work for every presenter. But the point is…texture is the key to holding people’s attention. So do SOMETHING.

Overall, using these four components to guide the creation of your presentations will ensure they go smoothly and make the impression you intend. They are, hands down, the secret to delivering successful presentations.

Need some help trimming your words down to save time in your presentation?  Check out these Four Quick Tips to Strengthen Your Writing.