Making presentations interactive should not be hard to achieve for your upcoming business pitch. Let us share with you a few tricks and ideas on how to make presentations interactive with your audience. 

Why make presentations interactive?

Understanding why we do something is a great way to ensure innovative ideas flow in our brains as to how to best achieve a goal. Therefore, let’s start off with the reason why anyone would like to make of their presentation an event where the audience gets to have a say in what is happening in the room. 

Interactive presentations bear the purpose of engagement. By getting an audience involved in what we’re saying or what we’re doing up on stage, we ensure the people we want to impact are actually present with us and that they’re following what we’re saying. This is how we make sure our time spent pitching an idea is not gone to waste on distractions, such as an audience checking their email and messages on their phones or even plain outright falling asleep!

Make the audience a part of your story

You know how effective storytelling in pitch deck presentations can be? Storytelling is a legendary oral art that has long worked to keep audiences attracted to whatever a person is sharing. This is no different for our current day business presentations. 

Use storytelling to engage an audience, but also to interact with them. Make the people around you a part of your story by working on your presentation’s plot. If you keep your climax where ideal, people will stick with you until you give them the conflict resolution, for example. 

So give your audience bits and pieces of an unresolved plot and you will find them interacting with you until they find their release; that is, the end of your story. 

Think of openings as ice breakers

We sometimes struggle trying to come up with the perfect hook to a business presentation. Think of your presentation start as a time to break the ice with your audience. 

For business pitches, you should be able to outline your entire startup’s concept, problem and solution, its traction, market insertion and more in a matter of five minutes. Therefore, it is less common to engage in ice-breaking activities per se within those time restrictions. However, there are settings where presentations can have an ice-breaking exercise as a perfectly admissible start. There are plenty of occasions when that is even enjoyable. 

Especially after a long run of presentation after another, people will appreciate the person who has come up to open up their presentation space so others can move around, reset their thoughts, maybe laugh a little, relax and start again. 

For business pitches, think of breaking the ice with a humorous remark, a rhetorical question or an invitation for the audience to imagine a scenario you are outlining for them step by step. 

Rest assured going for such an ice-breaking initiative means getting you started on the right foot. Sharing this gift with people will set the mood that your presentation will be more interactive throughout, which already means winning them over a bit more confidently at least during the initial minutes of your presentation. Consider this an open door to keep getting your audience involved in more bilateral ways, as well. If public speaking issues are your main problem to create this type of engagement, check out this video:

Showcase your product in video format

If your product demo can be showcased ideally in video form, factor in how much more emotional reactions a video can elicit in audiences. You would thus be using video form where applicable to generate what your verbal sharing can’t. 

Craft your video content in a way that fosters the story you are telling throughout your pitch. Weaving the plot structure onto your visuals is a great way to put everything together. This will help draw audiences further into your presentation. 

In case you want to look into video embedding on Slidebean, we have a feature for that. Check out Caya's video explanation to it below:

Poll the room

When dealing with a commonality of a problem, you can even generate a poll on the spot. Getting your audience to vote is an easy way of making people engage with your pitch. 

Based on the room’s results, you can direct yourself to one point or another of your pitch deck slides. However, and more commonly, these polls will hopefully trigger the results you need to further strengthen your point. 

Doing so doesn't only benefit your viewers by getting them to interact, but it furthermore solidifies your remark to investors with a live example of what you are stating. 

The power of asking questions

Even just rhetorical queries, as we outlined before, will help spark an interest in your audience. Place the queries at the exact times when attention spans tend to drop during your pitch. 

We know we lose our audience after 5 minutes of having opened our business presentation. So calculate when you can best insert a new query, even if rhetorical, to ignite the sense of attention in your viewers once again. 

While presenting your problem slide, for instance, should be an easy point of your pitch when you can ask a rhetorical or formal question. You are ideally dealing with something to which your audience has been exposed as consumers. Therefore, you can use the power of a question to get them to relate to that which your startup is precisely trying to solve. 

“How many times have you been to the hardware store not to find whatever it is you need?” for example. Say you were selling a very peculiar and AI-powered, high-tech app that solves this need. Of course we don’t expect you will be, but any product or service you're offering should be able to have its solution rephrased in the form of a question. Use that to your benefit. 

Rely on pauses

Ironically, silence also bears great power. If you can identify when a pause is ideal during your pitch deck, you might find this to be a time when your audience checks in with you once more.

They might wonder what has stopped if they were not fully following you. Or they might appreciate the reflection your pause incites as a way of connecting further with you. 

Consider pausing and giving yourself and the audience a break from what you’re presenting; it might help in really mysterious and powerful ways.   

Stunning design

We hope this has helped stir your imagination as to how to best juice up your presentations through engaging presentation interaction. If you’re ready to create a stunning presentation at Slidebean, click below!

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