Online PowerPoint Presentation.com

The phrase “in conclusion” is used too frequently and often without actually being at the very end of a presentation. “In conclusion” is a signal to your audience to start paying attention again and make sure that they receive the key take-away messages that they might have missed while checking their email or paying their bills while only half paying attention to your online PowerPoint presentation.

Too many presenters falsely signal the end of their presentation with this phrase and the problem is they rarely actually conclude with a concise trailing statement. I’ve been in webinars and seen online presentations where the speaker has said “in conclusion” nine times during his presentation. If you really want to annoy and lose the attention of your audience, say “in conclusion,” and then keep on going for another ten or twenty minutes.

The best thing to do is simply avoid the phrase “in conclusion” altogether.  If you have a well organized online PowerPoint presentation that focuses and repeats your key messages, your audience will have absorbed that information by the time your presentation ends. Leave your audience with something more thought-provoking, or if the online meeting was more light-hearted, use something appropriately humorous. You want to leave your audience looking forward to your next presentation, not dreading it.

Message retention is the most important take-away in any online PowerPoint presentation. Your entire presentation should revolve around only a couple key messages. The universal rule in message retention is repetition.

Start off your online PowerPoint by telling them what you are going to tell them, second, tell them, and finally tell them what you just told them. While you’re telling them, tell them over and over again. While repeating the exact same thing word-for-word will drive your audience insane, you can instead make an important point and use several different illustrations to drive that key message home.

If you want the audience to remember the important points in your message, you have to make each point in 3-6 different ways. According to one study, if you make a point only a single time, by the end of your presentation, just 10% of your audience will remember it. If you repeat a point as many as six times, retention then jumps to 90%. Without repetition, 40% of your audience will forget almost everything you said within 20 minutes of your conclusion. Within 24 hours, 70% of the audience will have forgot almost 100% of your message.