The secret to delivering successful presentations.

April 16, 2025

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.

A girl with long brown hair wearing a royal blue, black, and white dress sits atop a white cabinet with her legs crossed. She's holding a bottle of prosecco in one hand and a cup of coffee in the other, and her face looks pensive, as she's trying to decide between the two.

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.

ChatGPT tips for tourism marketers.

February 13, 2023

Here’s why tourism marketers need tips for using ChatGPT, an online program that engages in human-like dialogue based on a prompt:  because we’re all too damn busy to waste time.  And messing around with a new tool we’re not sure we’d even use feels a lot like wasting time.  Is it worth it?  Should you invest the time to get familiar with ChatGPT because that investment of time will pay off?

Short answer:  yes.  You need to know what this tool can REALLY do before you decide to embrace or reject it.  It has some uses that may surprise you.

So let’s jumpstart your learning curve with some practical tips for how tourism marketers can explore the benefits of using ChatGPT.

First, let’s get one thing straight.  ChatGPT is just a resource and a tool.  You’ve got a lot of tools to help you do your job.  Google is a tool.  Adobe Illustrator is a tool.  Semrush is a tool.  But the relentless media frenzy around ChatGPT has given it near-mystical properties that make it seem more potent than that.  Chill out, y’all.  It’s just a tool.  It’s one more resource in your toolbox to potentially help you do your job better, smarter, and faster.

And like all tools [she says sheepishly, aware that she barely knows how to use 5% of the available apps on her iPhone], its usefulness is only as powerful as your knowledge of how to harness it.  I’ll never forget years ago when an accounting mentor said to me, “If you’re doing any manual calculations whatsoever or taking a long time to manipulate data in an Excel spreadsheet, then there’s a shortcut, command, or function you just don’t know about. Excel is designed to make life easier.  If it’s making it harder, go learn more about Excel.”

ChatGPT is the same.  When you first try it out, you won’t be savvy at knowing how to coax the most effective results from it.  So you’ll plug in a few basic things and the outcomes will be unimpressive.  And then, because you’re super busy and there’s no mandate that says you need to use ChatGPT, you’ll dismiss it as unhelpful and go back to the familiar tools in your toolbox.

But what if I told you that…

  • You could paste a particularly legalese-sounding section of a vendor contract into ChatGPT and say “explain this to me like I’m an 8th grader”…and it does?
  • It could produce a style guide for all your team members to follow, after you feed it several samples of a brand’s voice to analyze?
  • It could take your 400-word bio and make it fit that directory listing’s 100-word requirement in just one click?
  • It could give you a substantive list of story ideas for your content calendar…and then organize them into a seasonal schedule…and then create first drafts of each piece of content, in different formats for social channels, blog posts, email newsletters…and even website copy that’s optimized for the keywords you require?

It can indeed do all those things and more…if you know how to prompt it effectively.

Janette Roush is Executive Vice President, Marketing and Digital, for NYC & Company, which is the official DMO/CVB for New York City.  And she’s one of ChatGPT’s early adopters and passionate champions who is learning to master the “art of the prompt.”

“If you want to get ChatGPT to give you useful answers, the key is in how you formulate your prompt,” Roush told me.  “I was once advised to think of it like an omniscient three-year-old.  It knows everything under the sun, but it doesn’t know who YOU are, WHY you need to know, and WHO you’re trying to talk to.  You need to prompt it with details like that for it to return a result that’s written in the context you need.  Otherwise the result will be very generic and way less useful to your purpose.”

Roush has honed her prompting skills through persistent trial and error.  In fact, she even documents her journey with ChatGPT on LinkedIn, making regular posts about prompts she’s tried for a wide variety of uses and the results they’ve produced.  (Pro tip:  Connect with or follow her there.  You won’t regret it.)

Inspired by Roush, I took ChatGPT for a three-hour test drive one morning, just giving it prompts for various tourism-marketing-related things.  One thing I quickly learned is that a generic prompt yields a generic answer and specific prompt yields a specific answer.  Case in point:  Look at how it adjusted its responses for social media captions based upon my specificity:

A screen shot of a ChatGPT dialogue about Lucy the Lobster in Nova Scotia Canada, as one example of ChatGPT tips for tourism marketers.

 

A screen shot of a ChatGPT dialogue that shows how it creates a caption to describe cider donuts, as an example of ChatGPT tips for tourism marketers.

 

And it did the same thing as I sought its help to generate story ideas for Northern California:

 

A screen shot of a ChatGPT dialogue that gives five general story ideas for travel to the region, as an example of ChatGPT tips for tourism marketers.

 

A screen shot of a ChatGPT dialogue that shows how specific prompts can yield more effective results, as part of ChatGPT tips for tourism marketers.

 

Are those story ideas all perfect with no need for tweaking?  Perhaps not.  But did it give me threads to follow where before I had none?  Absolutely.  And some good ones too.

So, in addition to writing copy, one use of ChatGPT is to think of it like you would a sounding board.  Or a brainstorming partner.  It can’t ideate on its own (it’s not designed to innovate) but it can work with the prompts you give it to hit you back with starter threads.

Roush shared some spectacular direction on how to prompt ChatGPT as a sounding board in one of her recent LinkedIn posts:

 

A screen shot of a LinkedIn post by Janette Roush that instructs how to prompt ChatGPT for the most effective results.

 

You may be thinking “well, why can’t I just Google stuff like that instead of using ChatGPT?”  And you can.  But Google (“regular” Google, not the emerging Google Bard version that’s trying to infuse AI into its experience but not quite succeeding as of this writing) will give you a slew of different links for you to go explore and assimilate all the information on your own. And ChatGPT will just…answer you.  Not with “here are ten sources you can read to find story ideas” or “here are ten sources to see how other destinations are making themselves an attractive esports destination.”  It delivers YOUR story ideas, and tells you how YOUR destination can achieve an attractive esports destination profile.

And then – mind blown – you can direct it to actually WRITE that story about ice skating in Northern California or OUTLINE that strategic plan to develop esports tourism in NYC.

Again…will they be final drafts that need no tweaking?  Absolutely not.  They will be FIRST drafts, but if you’ve prompted with care, they’ll be pretty damn good first drafts.

And THAT saves you time, which is the whole point of using ChatGPT for marketing assistance.

But wait, you say.  When I use Google as a resource tool, I can handpick from among sources on the results pages that I feel are legitimate and credible.  Without such references, how do I know the information I’m getting from ChatGPT is accurate?

Folks, I remind you again that ChatGPT is not supposed to be a mystical tool that sees all and knows all.  You’ll need to check your facts, just like you would using any other source.  Do you really think that something is accurate just because you got it from a source on Google that you consider “credible?”  News outlets get details wrong, websites have outdated information, and inaccurate stuff has a way of floating around and perpetuating online.  So, ChatGPT is no more nor less credible than any other source you use.  And you should do your due diligence on its output when necessary.

And while we’re at it, I should also remind you that most of the output you get from ChatGPT will need tweaking and polish.  Even with the absolute best of prompting, there will still be nuances and phrasing you’ll need to infuse.  So it can’t hurt to brush up on your writing skills, and these tips will help.

If you want to explore how ChatGPT can potentially help you with your tourism marketing needs but you’re not sure how to begin, Roush offers these four tips to get started:

  1. Commit to a finite time period for practice.  You won’t learn how to use any new tool unless you devote time to using it.  Roush recommends setting a challenge to yourself, with some kind of accountability built into the period.  Take two weeks or a month or whatever, during which you commit to prompting ChatGPT on at least one topic every day.  “I challenged myself to post a new ChatGPT insight on LinkedIn every day for a month, and it forced me to think of that tool daily,” she says.  “It didn’t come naturally to me at first, but after a while, as various needs arose throughout the day at work, I’d automatically say to myself ‘let me see how ChatGPT would handle that.’ And then I’d dive into prompting.”
  2. Don’t think of it just for help with writing.  With accurate prompting, ChatGPT is an excellent resource for organization, explanations, curation, and more.  Roush says it’s helped her structure her lesson approach for her work as an Assistant Professor at Hunter College, and it’s helped flesh out her vacation itinerary in Montreal by finding cool things to do nearby to her already-planned stops.  “I’ve also used it to help it explain things I don’t fully understand,” she says, “like when I understand 80% of a technical proposal and I want to understand 100% of it.  I can ask ChatGPT to explain it to me in layman’s terms.”
  3. Learn to become specific in how you prompt.  You won’t be good at this right out of the gate.  It takes time and practice to master the art of prompting.  When Roush first dabbled in using ChatGPT, she – like most folks – prompted it with “silly things,” just trying out generic questions and commands, and receiving lackluster responses.  “It wasn’t until I stumbled upon how to start being more specific that I began to see the possible uses of ChatGPT,” she says.  “I had asked it to create an itinerary for my vacation in Montreal and it was pretty vanilla, just hitting all the major tourist sites.  But when I fed it my existing itinerary and asked it to suggest enhancement additions using the right prompts for specificity, it really impressed me.”
  4. Let ChatGPT create a style guide for you, so it learns to deliver responses in your own voice.  Roush fed it around 40 of her previous LinkedIn posts and asked it to create a writing style guide for her… which it did shockingly well.  Now she can instruct ChatGPT to use that guide when asking it to write stuff on her behalf.  “It was surprising how well the style guide captured my voice,” she said.  “If I had tried to analyze my own work and write up my own style guide, it would have taken forever and probably been less accurate.”

The bottom line is that the more you use it, the more uses you’ll discover for it.  And with practice at the art of prompting, you can make ChatGPT something akin to a full-service virtual assistant who brainstorms, writes, organizes, and educates.

Or… not.  You may end up hating it, but until you REALLY take it for a lengthy and diverse test drive, how will you ever know?

Related reading: Issac Asimov’s I, Robot.  It was written in 1950 and well…here we are, folks.

The key to making a business announcement successfully.

June 28, 2017

Say you’ve just overhauled your guest service program.  Or completed a design renovation.  Or created a new HR program in response to staff issues.  Or launched a new brand.  Or website.

And then you sit down to write the email, press release, or speech to unveil it to your key audiences.  Here’s the one vital tip you need to make it effective and powerful:

No one cares how hard you worked.

Think about it. How many times have you heard a brand or company representative say

  • We’ve worked tirelessly to…
  • Our team has worked long and hard to…
  • We’ve been working day and night to…

Does that make their message any more meaningful to you?  Nope.  In fact, here’s a few hard truths about human nature conspire to subtly undermine the successful reception of your announcement:

What’s In It For Me?:  Saying how hard you worked is blah-blah to the audience.  Your dedication is irrelevant…what’s the result that impacts them?  Wasting air time with blah-blah just risks losing their attention.

Skepticism Trigger:  The moment someone draws attention to how hard they worked, we subconsciously doubt it.  If you truly worked hard on something, the results would prove it.  Proclaiming it just makes the audience wonder why you’re trying to hard to convince them that you did your job.

Soliciting Gratitude is Resented:  Revealing how hard you worked – especially when you’re fixing a negative situation – only makes it look like you’re seeking a head pat.  And only adorable dogs can credibly get away with begging for head pats.  In humans, it usually just inspires exasperated eye-rolling.

Instead…just share your news straight up, including the benefits to them.  Like so:

On the new Redpoint website, you can explore our expertise with easy one-click case study sorting relevant to your needs, sign up to get tips and trends from our wildly popular industry newsletter Tickled Red, and listen to music from our office live concert series.  Go check it out…we hope you find it fun and useful. 

See?  Straight up.  No plea for head pats.