What is the central message of your PowerPoint presentation? Can you summarize the essence of your presentation in a few sentences? If you don’t know the answer to these questions, you should look into this topic a little more.
I’ve really seen a lot of presentations due to my job, and I’m assuming you feel the same way. Among them were many really good PowerPoint presentations, professionally delivered by well-prepared speakers.
Still, I often found that the speaker’s delivery didn’t really grab me. With the amount of information usually conveyed in a lecture, little really stuck in these cases. Most of the time, after the end of such a presentation, I would ask myself why he was telling me and the rest of the audience all this. Something was missing: the central message. What does the speaker want me to take away besides a set of facts?
Why is formulating the core message so important?
The core message, i.e. the central message, is the essence of your presentation, so to speak. It is the reason you want to give a presentation in the first place. Because surely you want to make an impact with your professionally designed slides and precisely rehearsed lecture. You want to convince your audience and ideally you want to make people do something through your presentation. They want to form an opinion. To achieve this, the core message itself must be clear to you. For example:
– Our new model is the best/most affordable/most economical mid-size passenger car on the market,
– regular exercise keeps you healthy and fit into old age,
– Electric motors are superior to internal combustion engines,
– Party XY stands up for your rights.
The central message – the essence of your presentation
This essence is the backbone of your presentation. You know what message you want to plant in the minds of your audience. Now you can consider what facts, arguments and examples you can include in your presentation to support your key message. What is really convincing? What needs to be mentioned to get your audience to “buy” your story?
Let’s take the example of the best mid-size car mentioned above. What is the danger of not thinking about the central message beforehand? In your presentation, you easily string together a multitude of information: about the development center that designed this new model, the wide range of engines, the great special paint finishes, the greeting from the Board of Management on the big launch, and the nationwide network of authorized workshops. At the end, the audience may know everything about this car, just not why they should buy it. Therefore, you need to think about this carefully in advance and answer this important question for yourself first. Once you know the answer, you can tailor your presentation to select slide content that reinforces the core message.
You can quickly determine if your current PowerPoint presentation contains a central message . Try to summarize the entire presentation in two to three sentences. If you do not succeed, it would be advisable to think again exactly what you want to achieve with your presentation and whether all content is really aligned with this goal.
Dipl.-Wirtsch.-Informatiker Matthias Garten as the expert for multimedia presentations and professional PowerPoint presentations knows about the art of professional slide design. He is an entrepreneur, speaker (TOP 100 Speaker), trainer (TOP 100 Excellence Trainer), multiple book author, presentation coach (presentation training), member of the GSA and Club 55, organizer of the Presentation Conference, Presentation Bootcamp and Presentation Rocket Days. 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 and PowerPoint agency smavicon Best Business Presentations and with his team has created over 15,000 professional PowerPoint presentations for over 150 industries since 1993.
