Visual Power: How Effective Visuals Can Transform Your Public Speaking

When you present, do your key points arrive bang on target every time?

In my journey as a Communication Coach, I've noticed a common challenge many speakers face: the effective use of visuals in presentations. Despite excelling in content and delivery, their PowerPoint slides often lack the power to truly engage the audience, leading to a disconnect from the core message. This overlooked aspect of communication is vital for engaging an audience and achieving your communication goals.

Why are most visuals not engaging and hard to digest?

Most PowerPoint slide training focuses on technical features, neglecting the art of visual storytelling, so How to Think Visually, essential for compelling presentations. Surprisingly, this aspect is often missing in Marketing and Communications education as well.

Few individuals come to me asking for help with their PowerPoint slides. However, 100% of my clients need support in this critical aspect of communication. Afterwards they tell me their visuals helped transform their messages and gave them an unexpected confidence boost.

Why are visuals so crucial in presentations?

Let me outline my Top 10 reasons, emphasising their role in what makes a good speaker:

1.      Engagement and Storytelling: Engaging visuals are like a magnet for the audience's attention, essential in an era of constant distractions. They enhance storytelling, keeping the audience focused on the presenter and their content.

2.      Enhanced Understanding: Visuals like graphs, charts, and images break down complex information, critical for technical and data rich content required in science, engineering, finance etc.

3.      Emotional Impact: The right visual can stir emotions, creating a mood or inspire action. Great slides help compensate for the physical and character elements lost in remote presentations.

 4.      Memory Retention: People generally remember visual information better than text or speech. Incorporating visuals can help ensure that your key messages stick, long after the presentation is over. It’s like planting visual seeds in your audience’s memory garden. You may also be familiar with the neuroscientific concept of ‘dual coding’; the mechanism by which oral and visual signals have an additive effect on each other.

5.      Professionalism and Branding: High-quality visuals can elevate the perceived professionalism of your presentation; and as a result, the perceived quality of your products and services too.

They also provide opportunities for branding, aligning the presentation's aesthetics with your organisation's identity. Much thought goes into the colour combinations of a brand design and maximising its visibility. Using branding creates familiarity so the audience’s attention is focused on the new content and not on the slide background.

6.      Condensing Information: Great visuals can condense large amounts of data or information into digestible pieces. It's like turning a thick, intimidating novel into an engaging comic book.

7.      Cultural and Language Barriers: In our increasingly globalised world, visuals can transcend language barriers as often non-native audiences have varying levels of English. Visual messages can ensure they are not missed by those too polite or too self-conscious to ask you questions.

Plus increased requirements to present in your second or third language, English, combined with a reduction in time and resources for language learning can compromise the speaker’s confidence.

8.      Time-poor multi-taskers: Not giving speakers their full attention during presentations can mean they miss the ‘pearls of wisdom’ flowing from your, the speaker's, mouth.

9.      Cognitive strain: Is reduced among audience members as we are much happier accessing content through moving images and colour than off printed pages.

10.   Presenting online: Your slides are even more crucial as much of your physicality is diminished: you, the speaker can't stride the stage, make large gestures or catch the eye of the audience members.

Choreography, especially, adds energy and enables you to connect with the audience in a different way, compensating for the lack of in person presence.

Thinking Visually is not about making your PowerPoint slides look pretty; it's about making your message more impactful, memorable, and engaging.

What’s the solution?

Creating engaging presentations does require a commitment of time and resources. But ‘myth buster alert’, it doesn't have to be overly time consuming or expensive and you don't need to be a professional graphic designer.

Above all, changing your mindset and having a solid methodology are all you need.

To address these challenges, I've developed a 7-step process to help professionals Think Visually and create compelling PowerPoint slide decks. Everyone can turn into an aspiring ‘graphic designer,’ able to produce engaging visuals more quickly and efficiently.

Step 1 – Plan to set up your goal and message, your story and its tone

Step 2 – Focus to begin the presentation creation with titles and data presentation, concepts and text

Step 3 – Signpost to remind the audience where they are with shapes, colours and imagery

Step 4 – Include to support the potential diversity in your audience: non-native English speakers, colour blind, vision and hearing impaired, dyslexic and ADHD individuals

Step 5 – Highlight to bring visibility to your messages with colour, placement, dimension and annotation

Step 6 – Edit to check your colour palette and consistency, eliminate duplication and reduce complexity

Step 7 – Choreograph to bring your visuals to life (this is key online) with vibrant energy through animation and transitions and to deliver your messages in the order you intend.

Interested in learning more?

These steps are part of my ‘7 Step Think Visually’ workshop and will be available as an online course in 2025.

If you can’t wait for this release, iin May 2024 I’m launching a mini ecourse ‘PowerPoint slide design/Think Visually Top 10 starter tips.’ Click on this link for more information.

Let’s transform your presentations together!

And if you would like to discuss your organisation’s (corporate, NGOs, Associations and Universities) Public speaking or Presentation skills needs, I offer free 30-minute consultations through my site.

I’d love to meet you