6 Creative Presentation Tools to Make Your Presentation More Engaging

You’ve put a lot of hard work, time, and effort into creating an awesome presentation. Then, the time comes to share it with your audience… and it falls flat. Why?

Your presentation doesn’t just have to look good. It has to grab your audience’s attention and hold on to it through to the last slide. It has to tell the story that you want. And you have to use more than just text to do that.

Learn which of Beautiful.ai’s creative presentation tools you can take advantage of if you’re ready to craft a truly engaging presentation.

Tell a story

One of the most important guidelines for a creative and engaging presentation is to tell a story. Your presentation should have a narrative arc and appeal to your audience. Whether you’re sharing company policies with new hires, presenting a marketing campaign idea to executives, or reviewing the past year in an all-hands meeting, your presentation must tell a story well.

To start crafting your story, think about your audience and your goals for the presentation. Are you meant to inform your audience? Entertain? Inspire? It might even be a mix of all three. Anticipate questions that your audience will have during your presentation, and try to answer them preemptively with your slides. Check that your presentation flows naturally and easily. 

If you’re stumped on how to organize your content or what to include, Beautiful.ai’s creative presentation tools can help. Look at our done-for-you presentation templates for all your storytelling needs.

Grab (and hold) attention with video

How powerful can video really be in a presentation? Take a look at this statistic: viewers retain nearly all of a message when they watch it on video compared to reading it in a text. They retain about 95% of a message in video form, in fact, while only about 10% of a message in text form is remembered. Our attention spans are shorter than ever today, thanks to technology. And we’re constantly looking for a new source of information that catches our eyes.

Video is so attention-grabbing because it encompasses different forms of content that pleases our senses. Visuals, sound or music, text: videos can turn it all into a compelling story. That’s why Beautiful.ai created a new video upload feature to make it easier for you to incorporate videos naturally into your slides. Use this feature to add customer feedback, marketing content, product demos, and more to your presentation.

Add animation

Level up your slide content and make it come to life with animation. Not only do animated presentation tools add style and a personal touch to your presentation, but they can also help you control how you deliver your information.

Control the pace of your presentation with an animation setting that waits for your mouse click to proceed. It’ll allow you to spend more time on certain slides or content that demand discussion or feedback. Plus, you can finish sections of your presentation with a big slide reveal for maximum drama, if you like.

Customize your slides

Using a template to design your slides lets you spend more time on content and overall presentation. But sometimes, those designs can get in the way of creating the exact presentation you want. You need the best of both worlds with intuitive slide templates and wiggle room in design. Enter: Elements, a better, more powerful, more flexible version of Beautiful.ai.

Need more room to add text? An extra chart or table to present your data? How about the ability to move, scale, or customize one of your graphics? That’s what Elements does. When you have more creative control over your slides, you can truly craft a presentation that speaks to your audience.

Use on-brand images

Video, slide animations, and customized designs can pack a lot of punch in your presentation. Don’t forget about images, too! High-quality, on-brand images can help you tell your story and capture your audience’s attention.

Slides with long blocks of text are unappealing to the eye. Sometimes, a well-chosen image will uplift your text and make your information more memorable. Like video, images can make a lasting impression on your audience, sometimes far more than text can. 

If you’re not sure what images to add to your presentation, choose from our free image library of photography, icons, graphics, and logos.

Evoke emotion

Whether you do it through imagery, videos, pull quotes, graphics, use of color, or your actual presentation speech, evoke emotion in your audience. One thing that evokes emotion is sound. Beautiful.ai’s new audio recording feature allows you to add audio to each slide. With this feature, you can add a specific recorded message to your deck. 

Make your audience feel inspired, motivated, entertained, or part of something bigger. They’ll connect that emotion with your overarching presentation message.

Create a presentation with Beautiful.ai

Ready to get started on your next presentation? Sign up with Beautiful.ai, choose a template that fits your idea, and start designing! Our templates, graphics, and tons of design options make it easy to tell a story with your presentation.