The importance of stories to business presentations…..
Business Presentations
From an early age we are read stories, taught with stories and watch stories on Tv and film. We are taught that stories are a powerful way of communicating. Those of you with children will no doubt have used a story or two when trying to teach them a moral or a lesson or even just entertain them! The oldest art-form world in storytelling. Why then when making business presentations does storytelling often go out of the window in favour or lifeless, unstructured lines of text and statistics with little context or explanation as to why this is important?
If you can use the power of storytelling in your business communications your message will be so much more powerful and have much greater impact. This doesn’t mean that you have to find a well known story or a fairy-tale in order to relate your message of course! Stories are everywhere – in business, in life, with people – in fact anecdotes are the most powerful and interesting stories you can use in your business presentations. And if you exemplify each of your key points with an interesting anecdote evidence shows your message will be retained much more successfully than just conveying the fact!
We all readily understand a story and engage with the messages we receive from it. TV, film and books are part and parcel of our every day consumption. Even stories on social media are part of our daily consumption nowadays. So as a business if you tap into what communications people are currently engaging in you will have a greater chance of being successful.
Look at any good advert, promotional video or marketing video. It will tell a story (or it should!). You should do the same with your business presentations. Regardless of whether you are creating a professional presentation using Powerpoint, Prezi or simply planning to deliver a presentation with a flip chart then you should make your whole presentation one stories, containing some sub stories. If you ever notice the structure of a good comedian’s stand up set; they will often use one main story to ring fence their piece and within that will tell lots of mini stories and go here and there but eventually coming back to their main story in a circular structure. It works, the audience buys into it and it is ell structured. This is one of the benefits of using a Prezi presentation; that you can visually mimic this circular structure using a big picture design and take your audience on a visual journey. And people remember visuals and images that are linked by stories.
If you need help developing your presentation, producing your business presentation or training your team to be able to better create and deliver your business presentation please contact us for a free no obligation consultation.
Watch this fantastic TedX talk about the Power of Storytelling
