Effective Business Presentations, Corporate Presentations, Public Speaking, Presentation Skills Training, Presentation Coaching

78% of presentations are forgotten within 3 days!

How do you make your presentation memorable?

It's easy too make a presentation memorable for all the wrong reasons, the bigger the goof the more memorable it becomes. But how do you make a presentation memorable for all the right reasons?

In this article I will ignore the obvious requirements for a presentation of having an objective, understanding what your audience want to hear and using appropriate graphical visual aids rather than slides full of text.

The first step is to ensure everyone is listening! If the audience are still thinking about the last activity they were involved in or worrying about something that may or may not happen in the future, they will be paying scant attention to what you are saying and certainly will not remember it.

You need to start with an attention grabbing opening. An opening remark which will make your audience really think. Think about the topic of your presentation. Asking a rhetorical question, quoting a humorous or contentious remark from a famous person or stating a thought provoking statistic are just some of the ways to grab your audience's attention. You need to ensure that your audience is tuned in to you and your topic right from the outset.

Now that you have their attention, your challenge is to keep it. Speaking in a lively, confident manner will certainly help as will knowing your subject matter but if you really want to make it memorable you need to gain your audience's involvement. The wise old man Confucius is attributed with the saying "I hear - I forget, I see - I remember, I do - I understand". While this may be an over simplification, it is certainly true that you remember participating in things for far longer than if you have only seen or heard other people do them.

Depending on the size of your audience you can involve them in different ways, for a small audience think of a game they could play and participate in, for instance you could structure your talk along the lines of "Who wants to be a Millionaire" or "The Weakest Link", asking questions that bring out the points of your presentation. As the size of your audience increases it becomes more and more difficult to have physical activities for people to participate in, although asking people to write down on paper "The 3 most import aspects of :" before asking people to call out their answer and writing them on a flipchart can be used for quite large groups. Alternatively you can ask people to pair off with the person next to them and do an activity as a pair.

However practical exercises are not always practicable. In this situation, the next best thing is to get people to do things in their head. Ask lots of rhetorical questions, take people on a journey or get them to imagine themselves in different scenarios. Remember it has to be personal rather than abstract.

The more involvement the audience has in your presentation the more they will remember it.

You need to end your presentation with as much impact as your attention grabbing opening. Don't just stop and say "Thank you, are there any questions?". You want to end with a punch, not just peter out. Something that links back to your opening remark and that reinforces what you have been talking about will usually work well. Then finally don't forget the all important "call to action" which will reinforce the objective of your presentation.

Mnemonics is the general practice of using artificial aids - rhymes, rules, phrases, diagrams, acronyms and other devices to help people memorise and recall names, dates, facts and figures. They are a great way of making things more memorable.

Some common ones include:

    My Very Educated Mother Just Showed Us Nine Planets.

    A mnemonic to help remember the names and order of the planets in our solar system.

    Mercury Venus Earth Mars Jupiter Saturn Uranus Neptune Pluto

Richard of York Gave Battle in Vain

for the colours of a rainbow.

Red Orange Yellow Green Blue Indigo Violet

How to get young children to remember how to spell 'because'?

Give them a mnemonic - Big Elephants Cannot Always Use Small Entrances.

An acronym such as OSRAM, which I use to remind people of the 5 main components of a presentation, is another type of mnemonic. Hopefully it helps you to remember Objective, Speaker, Room, Audience, Message and how to light up people's lives through your presentations.

Try thinking up memorable mnemonics for the topics of your presentation, it will help people recall the important elements, long after you have left.