copywriting | thinkit creative

How to create a presentation that doesn’t suck

By Patrick Gant

Most presentations suck.

They go on too long. The speaker’s compelling idea gets buried in a lot of noise. They make it feel like work for the audience to follow along. And we quickly forget what was said.

And yet some presentations don’t suck. Instead, they persuade. Some do this despite the fact that they’re long and packed with details. We remember what was said.

So why does that happen?

As someone who holds a lot of workshops and teaches what I know, I spend time studying what works well, based on the research and field work of people who are masters at their craft.

There are ten take-aways I’ve learned that you can apply to any presentation to make it connect better wth your audience.

All great stories are about structure

Even when presenting an idea, you are telling a story. Writer Steven Pressfield says it best: “the arc of the hero is a structure that is at the heart of every story.” That means every story we tell needs to define a problem, show a solution and then show what we learn by applying that solution. As a speechwriter, that’s at the core of every keynote I work on. It applies just as much to how you present your work. In your introduction, show your audience what they’re going to see in your talk and refer back to it as you move from point to point. If you don’t have structure, your presentation is going to suck.

Know your goals

The goal is not to make people know things. You can’t make people do anything. All you can do is persuade. Harvard’s Stephen Kosslyn, a well known cognitive neuroscientist, wrote what I consider an essential speaker’s guide on presentation clarity. He points out every presentation has three goals: earn an audience’s attention, keep that attention, and make it easy for people to both understand and remember what you talked about. If you miss any of these goals, your presentation will suck.

Slides don’t tell your story: you do

Your slides are designed to do two things: help your audience situate themselves in your story, and hold their attention. They are not your speaking notes or your TelePrompTer. In fact, they’re not for you at all. They are for your audience. If you find yourself reading from your slides, your presentation will suck.

Busy slides defeat your purpose

Busy slides either get read at the expense of listening or they get ignored. Here’s why. People can read faster than they can listen. So if you cram all your facts on your slides (and if it’s legible), your audience will read them. And they won’t listen to you while they do this, which raises questions why they’re there in the first place. Don’t do that. Treat each slide as the bare minimum of the point you’re driving at in that segment of your talk. Busy slides are the Batman signal of a presentation that’s going to suck.

Bullets kill attention

This point is a matter of opinion, but it’s an informed one based on what I see that works in the marketplace. Don’t use bulleted lists on slides. Bullets are used in long reports and in articles to compress ideas to keep a reader reading. But presentations aren’t documents. They are talks designed to hold your audience’s attention while you communicate persuasively. Even if you do decide to use bullets, heed the advice of Garr Reynolds in Presentation Zen: “people will tire quickly…if several slides of bullets lists are shown, so use them with caution.”

Pictures do more than words

Reynolds’s book on presentation design has a terrific section that illustrates the power of visuals to complement your message. He also shows how easy it is to undermine that power by trying to convey too much information on a slide by adding text and data. He describes it as a Signal to Noise ratio. The harder it is for your audience to understand the difference between one data point and another, the greater the likelihood your presentation is going to suck.

Don’t report numbers: show meaning

Behavioural science tells us there are two kinds of learners: visual-driven and data-driven ones. Even the latter group get frustrated and bored if all you do it use the “spray and pray” approach to reporting on a series of complicated facts. Stop making it feel like work to understand the point you are driving at. If you are showing a bar chart with five data points on it, your focus should not be on reporting each of those five points. That’s self evident. Show the relationship between these numbers. Is there a 38% jump in activity from point#1 to point#5? That’s your story.

Understand cognitive load

It’s not that people have short attention spans. It’s that time is limited and people are busy. Presentations communicate a lot of information in a compressed period. And generations of cognitive research reaffirm that audiences have far less capacity to retain and makes sense of messages than we give them credit for. You’ve had weeks and months and even years to think through what you want to talk about. They have maybe 20 minutes. Even less if they’re tuning you out because your presentation is sucking.

You is a magic word

I talk about this point often in the context of writing for the web and other copywriting. It matters just as much in presentations. If you write a presentation that talks to an audience like they are a mass of people, your presentation will suck. Talk to them as individuals. It is a profound need of all human beings to feel seen and heard. The less likely it is that each audience member feels you are saying “I see you,” the more likely your presentation is going to suck.

Polish your closing

Admit it: most of us who write a presentation devote 98% of our time working on having a strong opening hook and making sense of our most salient points. Your conclusion tends to be an afterthought. Usually because you’ve run out of time. I like how Garr Reynolds explains this. He points out that Japanese culture speaks of “Hara Hachi Bu,” which is to eat until 80% full. I try to adopt that principle when writing a conclusion: polished and filling, but not too much.

Heck yes, you need to write better headlines: here’s how and why

By Patrick Gant

Pay more attention to headlines in what you do.

Sure, you might be tempted to say “but I don’t write headlines in my work.”

Oh yes you do.

Ever find yourself needing to send an email but struggle to get readers to respond or to take some kind of action? Do you do analytical work that involves creating in-depth reports? Maybe you’re trying to find a stronger hook for your fundraising letter. Or maybe you’re looking at ways to get better at giving presentations that connect with people.

These are just a few examples where headlines can be valuable. We just don’t often think of them that way.

With email, we call it “coming up with a good subject line.” With reports and presentations, we ask ourselves “how can I cover all these complicated ideas in a way that doesn’t lose the reader?” See my point? Part of a headline’s power is its ability to compress an idea.

Sure, a great headline can attract attention (a practice that was alive and well 2,000 years ago in Rome when the first gazette, Acta Diurna, couched hard news with salacious stories).

But what they really do is give your reader a good reason to keep reading.

David Ogilvy—the true original MadMan of advertising—once said that “on the average, five times as many people read the headline as read the body copy. When you have written your headline, you have spent eighty cents out of your dollar.”

He wasn’t kidding about that last part. Even in my own work, I spend an inordinate amount of time crafting and refining headlines and subheadings, because it’s “the ticket on the meat” (another Ogilvyism).

Why does it matter so much? Because as I like to regularly remind: people are busy.

We live in a world now where the thing that is most scarce is audience attention.

You have to earn it and keep earning it. With that in mind, here’s what I know about how you can write better headlines that will help you keep earning those readers and find more homes for those ideas you want to share.

Make friends with action verbs
Cut out the fluffy features behind your idea until you’re left with a raw verb that describes what it can do for the reader (e.g., “Do…Grow…Make…Get…Take…Expand…”). It might not seem stylish to use them, but action verbs never get dull and they deliver the goods on answering that one question every reader has: “what’s in it for me to keep reading?”

Be more specific
Boring writing happens when you don’t know where you want the reader to look. As fiction writer Nancy Hale tells us: “The more specific you are, the more universal you are.” That applies to more than just fiction. Headline writing is compressed storytelling. And that’s something you can apply to any business. Find the glowing core in your story.

“How to” is your BFF
Veterans of advertising copy will tell you that you can’t write a bad headline that starts with “how to” (see what I did in the subject line of this email?) Granted, this is more relevant to email subject lines and presentation copy, but never say never when it comes to creating a surprising header even in dense analytical reports. I’ve seen it done.

But say no to link bait
You might think it’s tempting to mimic the linkbait strategies of Buzzfeed and others who peddle McContent (e.g., “You’ll never believe what happened next…” or “Seven ways to do X”). But don’t do it. That’s a race to the bottom and one that’s become so common now that readers are wise to the game. No amount of link baited traffic is going to erase the impression that you’ve snookered your audience into reading something that just wasn’t all that good or memorable. Your best ideas and your readers deserve better than that.

Do the unexpected
“State the opposite, not the obvious.” That’s what Sam Horn says in her book “Pop! Stand Out in Any Crowd.” Sometimes the best way to present an idea is to turn it inside out and say something that goes against conventional wisdom. Often that’s where real insight lives. Longtime CreativeBoost readers know that I’m quite fond of that particular strategy.

Yummy, tasty morsels
Break your ideas up into smaller ones. Assign a subheading to each one. Notice how I do that with by blog posts and newsletter? It’s a great way reward your readers for their attention and to honour their time. The trick is make it look like it’s not work to read things all the way though.

Hey, much like what you just did! See how that happened?

What John Coltrane can teach you about building your audience

By Patrick Gant

John Coltrane

No, don’t do that. Don’t run away.

Don’t let it scare you that I just name-dropped one of the giants of jazz.

Or that Coltrane’s music seemed complicated.

This post isn’t going to preach jazz to you. And the jazz police aren’t going to show up and arrest me for having the gall to use America’s finest art form as a platform to illustrate an important point about the power of audience building.

There’s valuable insight in here even if jazz isn’t your thing.

As a reader of thinkit creative, you could be here looking for advice on search-engine optimized writing for the web to generate online traffic and convert readers into buyers. Maybe you’re a writer looking to build a base of readers. Or perhaps you’re a professional speaker or you own a design studio and you’re looking to take your business to the next level of profitability.

Odds are good that you’re in the idea business. And that means your success hinges on finding and building an audience.

John Coltrane can help you with that.

Discipline

Even this giant of music started without an audience.

As a young musician, John Coltrane loved how saxophonist Charlie Parker wasn’t afraid to be playful with his music.

He emulated what he heard. Not as a cheap cut-and-paster of style.

Rather, his drive to decode Parker and other influential players became part of young Coltrane’s relentless practicing. Biographies on the man often quote fellow musicians who knew him early on, saying they’d never seen anyone put in the hours the way Coltrane did.

Out of the hours came the admirers. From the admirers came the listeners. And then the big breaks, like when he was invited to tour with the first time. Then the audience took hold and the Coltrane legend grew. It’s hard to imagine any of that happening in Trane’s career without the roots of discipline being as strong as they were.

Intuition

“Jazz…is a social music operating in a commercial context,” says Ben Ratliff of The New York Times in his book Coltrane: The Story of a Sound. “You give the audience what you think it wants. At the same time, you improvise, and try to bring out the part of you that is the least like anyone else.”

Groundbreaking ideas rarely find their audience quickly. It starts with thinking deeply about your audience and having as much of an understanding of what they want as what they might also be open to. Research will help you, but only up to a certain point.

Intuition goes well beyond calculating a market penetration or measuring the size of an audience. There’s a deeper art. And you only get to exercise that by trying and by experimenting based on a mix of what you know is true and on a hunch you have about what might be true.

Taste

Coltrane learned the hard way early on that masterful technique alone doesn’t win many ears. In fact, more than one audience in his career booed him for doing just that. He learned that ideas—especially the big ideas—have to be presented in a way that are pleasing to others. Often that means taking the time to package your ideas attractively.

One of Coltrane’s great achievements in the American songbook is what he did with his interpretation of the Rogers and Hammerstein classic show tune, My Favorite Things. The music says more than I can say in paragraphs about that. So have a listen.

Platform

To find and build an audience, your idea or your message needs a platform. My Favorite Things was a platform for Coltrane that helped him bring big-headed jazz to a wider audience. So what’s your platform? It can be a blog, an ebook, a series of newsletter articles, or a presentation (to name just a few examples). Invest the time to design that platform properly. Hire a good designer who can help you build something that people will enjoy using. That’s the front door. It’s how you’re going to invite your audience in so that they’ll stick around and see what else you have to say.

Mastery of any creative skill only comes from finding good influences and by putting in the hours to hone your skills. Work to emulate. This is how you learn how great ideas are constructed. Only then can your own voice emerge. Take chances and find ways to build entranceways for people to access even your edgy ideas with relative ease.

What a highway can teach you about how to make the most out of taglines

By Patrick Gant

Photo:underpuppy

Today, I want to talk to you about taglines and highways. It’s an unusual mix, but bear with me.

A tagline can be a valuable tool in marketing. When used properly, it can neatly sum up the value of your product or service with a phrase or idea that is memorable for your audience.

As a copywriter, a marketer and as a consumer, the trouble I find with many taglines is that they’re just not very effective at doing the job they’re supposed to do. They describe rather than sell. They talk about features rather than communicate in benefits. They try to say too much, or they state the obvious rather than zeroing-in on a core problem that the market has. They try too hard to be clever rather than be purposeful.

An ineffective tagline is a waste of your money and your audience’s time. And that takes me to my point about highways.

A few weeks ago, I was travelling on business and I opted to take a toll highway to get home. Like many privately owned enterprises, they took great pains to remind everyone of their tagline. So every few minutes I’d pass yet another road sign reading: “Fast. Safe. Reliable.” They had invested a lot of time and money to remind me of three obvious things that I counted on” with just about any road that I drive on, including the ones that aren’t toll roads!

Keep it simple

Remember one of thinkit creative’s top rules about writing that sells: people are busy. There’s no sense in having a wordy tagline, or one where you tell people something they already know, and that doesn’t communicate a unique benefit or value.

Here’s one of my favourite examples of doing tagline copy properly: when Apple launched the very first iPod back in 2001, their tagline didn’t talk about how the device worked or how revolutionary the design was. Instead the copy read “1,000 songs in your pocket.” So simple and yet so very focused on selling through benefits.

Remember purpose

No matter who you are, most people aren’t going to give you the time you want to explain your product or idea, let alone why they should buy it. Taglines work best when they are memorable. That’s their key purpose. Taglines aren’t the place where you explain things. It’s where you connect your product or service to a larger idea.

It’s not just about words

Don’t create a tagline just for the sake of having one. Taglines aren’t about tacking words up there beside your company logo. Taglines are about ideas. And ideas aren’t always conventional. So be willing to take chances. And stay focused on solving a key problem that your customer is facing.

Be persuasive without being salesy

No one likes to be pitched to in an overt way. In fact, there’s a growing body of research out there to suggest that poorly crafted copy can backfire when consumers sense they are in the presence of shameless sloganeering. As with all things in marketing, exercise good taste and common sense.

Sometimes you have to look harder

When it comes to copywriting, the fewer the words, the tougher the task. So where do you go looking for great taglines, elegantly crafted, that stick? Investing in professional copywriting and copyediting services can help you solve this common marketing problem. But even before you do that, it pays to dig deeper and look at who you are and what you do from your audience’s perspective.

What problem do they have that you help solve? In the case of that toll highway, a much better solution to their own business problem was found on a single sign near the end of the road, in typeface so small that a driver could barely read it. It doesn’t appear on any of the firm’s marketing collateral as far as I can tell. But its message is infinitely more effective, more memorable and more benefit-driven than all the other signage combined.

That sign simply asked the following question:

“How much time did you save taking this highway today?”

How to troubleshoot your sales copy today

By Patrick Gant

Photo by Patrick Gant

Struggling with sales copy that’s just not doing what it should for your business?

Here are five easy things you can do right away to make your copy connect with your readers and sell.

Get rid of everything that doesn’t identify a problem that your customer has and how you can solve it. Build out from there.

Take a red pen and circle every instance in your copy of “we,” “us” or “I.” Ask yourself if there’s a better way to make it about you—your customer.

Speak directly to your customer, rather than in that vague, disengaged voice of corporate authority.

Be succinct. Stop being afraid that doing this will dumb things down too much. Succinct is hard. It’s the outcome of making hard but necessary choices.

Pay closer attention to typography, spacing and graphical elements that complement your text. Design isn’t just prettied up text. If copy is what you have to say, design is how you say it.