If you aren’t using PowerPoint to market your business to your clients, you are losing out on a great visual exposure opportunity.

You will find your options open up with multimedia presentations by showcasing your product or service. With PowerPoint, you can add sound bites, videos, photographs, charts, graphs, and much more. It truly is a dynamic platform.

Why Do You Want to Add Bells and Whistles?

First, when you use PowerPoint to create a presentation, it will be more interesting and more interactive with your audience.

Whether you are making a presentation virtually or in front of a live audience, showing statistics, graphs, examples of your work, or sharing your desktop will engage your audience and keep them paying attention.

Second, there are many ways of learning, including auditory and visual. By simply speaking, you will capture the attention of those auditory learners. But by adding the visual PowerPoint slides, you will also capture your visual learners.

Lastly, think about the topic of your presentation. If you present a tutorial or how-to presentation, using slides to showcase the steps of doing something is much more concise and helpful than verbally trying to describe each step.

Put Yourself in the Audience for Just a Moment

If you are teaching a course about how to install and use WordPress, for example, would you rather listen to the directions or see the steps?

When it comes to computers and technology, adding PowerPoint slides to your presentation is highly recommended. It helps your audience members compare their own computer screens to what you are showing on the slides.

As we have all heard, a picture speaks a thousand words.

PowerPoint Presentation Best Practices

Slideshows are quick to produce, simple to update, and an effective way to engage others visually with your presentation when created correctly.

However, a busy slideshow with too many animations and transitions will be a distraction instead of a visual aid.

Below are several tips for finding the best middle-ground.

• Create a simple and consistent design template using the Slide Master feature, especially or colors, backgrounds, and fonts
• Limit the number of words on each slide to use only essential information and key phrases
• Minimize punctuation and using all capital letters
• Make sure each slide has enough white space to enhance readability
• Use contrasting colors for background and text
• Try to avoid backgrounds with a pattern as they can be distracting
• Use flashy transitions such as text fly-ins and other special effects sparingly
• Be sure your images and graphics reinforce your message and are of good quality
• When presenting to a live audience, do not read from your slides
• Avoid over-formatting your points

The key to creating a successful PowerPoint presentation is to use it as a visual aid and not a distraction.

Get the Most Out of Your PowerPoint Slides

When you have completed your presentation, there are several ways to re-purpose them for maximum effectiveness. Some of the ways to re-use your slides include:

Turn your slides into a special PDF report that you can give away for lead generation. Click on the File menu, choose Save As, and select PDF.

You have a few options available to turn your presentation into a video. One option is to save your presentation as a video after adding automated animations and transitions.

Another option is to choose a few of your most useful or interesting slides, add a voiceover or some background music, and record the video using rehearsed timing settings.

Be sure to upload your completed video to YouTube, embed it on your website or blog, and share it on all your social media channels.

Upload your presentation to a sharing site such as SlideShare.net. SlideShare is the quiet giant of social media platform where you can:

• Upload presentations privately or publicly
• Build your reputation and authority by uploading useful and relevant information
• Embed YouTube videos inside SlideShare presentations
• Generate leads with your presentations
• Download, remix, or re-use presentations on any topic
• Share on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter
• Embed on company intranets, websites, and blogs
• Measure performance via free analytics

Save your branded layout to use for future presentations to save time and improve brand name recognition.

Design your sides is half the work, so why not re-use them?

For continuity purposes, use the same branded design. Of course, this does not mean you cannot or should not vary your design elements.

Do take creative license so that every presentation you design will be refreshing and engaging for your audience.