You’ve gotten great information from the previous two posts about how to communicate and reinforce your message as a speaker. First, you make a great first impression through Visual Presence, then you engage with your audience immediately and consistently through Verbal Presence. Now it’s time to consider how well and how long your message will be remembered after you’ve left the room.
Whether you’re delivering a motivational speech at an industry convention or a data-driven presentation at a quarterly corporate meeting, your message must be remembered to be effective.
Visuals are Important
There are several ways to make sure this happens, and they involve the creation of the print and electronic materials you use, before, during, and after you speak.
Everything associated with your presentation needs to be treated as a package: from the announcement of the event or meeting, through the electronic and print materials you use in your presentation, to the follow-up recaps, details, or action items you send out.
Here are the most basic, and the most important, things to remember. These apply across all your pages whether they are printed on paper, projected onto a huge screen in front of the room, or displayed on a tablet computer.
“Visually Compelling” is Just the Beginning
One of the best things you can do is use good Page ArchitectureTM habits when creating your materials. Work to make the materials that support your message easy to use, understand, and act upon, as well as being visually compelling:
- Help your audience quickly understand what they’re looking at by left justifying all your text, including the headings. People can then easily run their eyes down a strong axis of information. This automatically pulls them into the text and gets them reading as soon as they see something they need or find interesting—often before they even realize it.
- Let your pages breathe. From PowerPoint slides, to handouts, to follow-up emails and reports, give your reader the comfort and ease of adequate white space. People are more willing to pick up and read a couple of comfortable pages than they are to attempt a single page of wall-to-wall text or graphics.
- Brand all your presentation materials using your visual Business Identity building blocks: your business identity colors, typefaces, logo(s), and background (paper or screen color and texture). This visual professional-polish supports and lends credibility to your message.
The main thing here is to avoid overwhelming your audience with dense pages. Give them pages that are well organized and easy to scan, not too crowded for comfort, and branded to look like a familiar and trusted you.
Doing just these few things will improve how well and how long people remember your message. Next time I’ll offer you some strategies for creating the specific kinds of materials you use before, during, and after you speak.
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