How to be a Persuasive Presenter
Give It Some Welly!
Power Up Your Presentations
If you want your presentations to persuasive and compelling, you need to hook your audience from the start.
Whether the objective of you presentation is to entertain, educate or persuade, you need to engage with your audience and develop a rapport with them to get them onboard with your aim.
Presentation Content
How to be a persuasive presenter? Starts with the basics.
Think about the content of your presentation. Once you’ve decided what you want to say, how are you going to present it?
A well structure speech will help your audience take in what you’re saying.
In simple terms, simplify. Focus on what the audience needs to know about.
Ask yourself, is this information essential? Remember, you’re trying to engage with them, so this has to be about them. If you’re selling something, whether a product, service or an idea, you need to show how it can help them in some way.
It’s important to structure the presentation in a way that makes it easy for you to present and the listeners to follow.
You need them to understand that you’re interested in them and what you can do for them. It’s essential to be believable, sincere, authentic, call it what you will.
The content of your speech has to be appealing, to be relevant. But the way you deliver it will make a big difference to its effectiveness.
Vocal Enthusiasm
If you want to excite and engage your audience, you need to sound excited by your subject. This doesn’t mean speaking at high speed. Far from it.
But it does mean speaking knowledgeably and enthusiastically about the subject rather than reading from a script in a monotone.
Try to vary the pace and volume. Slowing down and increasing your voice volume when delivering key points will make them more memorable.
Find more guidance in our post on how to use your voice.
Eye Power
Eye contact is crucial. To be convincing, to become a persuasive presenter, you need to make eye contact with the audience.
Just scanning the audience from side to side and from front to back at key points in the presentation will make a difference.
And, for a fraction of a second, directly looking into the eyes of every audience member will make a bigger difference.
Body Language
Your body language is an important aspect in being a persuasive presenter.
You can use your hands to emphasise key points and to appear enthusiastic, but too much arm waving can be distracting.
And we certainly don’t want a wandering windmill endlessly moving around at the front of the room.
Humour
Using humour is one of the most effective ways to engage with your audience and get them on your side.
However, humour needs to be relevant to the situation and to what you are saying. There is a considerable difference between a client presentation and a social situation such as a wedding.
Self-deprecating humour can work well. However, this is not the same as apologising unnecessarily for any inadequacies you think you may have. Do that and you will undermine your authority on the subject.
Dare To Be Different!
You now have an effective presentation in place. But could you make it stand out from the crowd and have even more impact?
If you start with a PowerPoint slide that looks like all the other slides your audience has seen in countless presentations, you aren’t going to generate much excitement are you?
Why not forget soulless stock images and use hand drawn images? Or bin some of the slides and use physical props instead.
If you want your audience to take a certain course of action, you could start by saying why they should do the opposite. And then demolish that approach with the reasons why your approach or product is better.
Whatever you decide to do, remember that it should be all about the audience, not about you.
(Last updated 20th August 2025)
You may also like our post on How to make Powerful Presentations
And here are five quick tips from Aristotle 2000 years ago!
Why not subscribe to our newsletter to be notified when we post a new blog article?
Estimated reading time: 4 minutes