How to Design Keynote Presentations That Engage Audiences

Seven out of ten people say that⁠(opens in a new tab or window) knowing how to give a highly engaging presentation is a skill that's critical to their career success. Yet 75% of those same respondents admit that they struggle with captivating their audience and maintaining their audience's focus during a presentation.

This widespread struggle with audience engagement often comes down to a key missing link: planning for engagement with compelling visuals, and carefully crafted ways to allow interaction with the audience, without throwing you off course

A powerful presentation⁠(opens in a new tab or window) isn't just about your storytelling, voice, tone, or body language—although these things are important, too.

An engaging keynote is also about the presentation slide deck supporting you as you speak from that stage, conference room, or even the virtual meeting room⁠(opens in a new tab or window) that many of us have grown accustomed to over the past few months, as well as pre-empting moments of audience interaction and preparing for them.

Unfortunately, the typical approach to writing, designing, and putting together a keynote presentation slide deck often leaves audiences bored, distracted, and unengaged. Even worse, many public speakers lean too heavily on their slide deck, and it becomes more of a crutch than a truly impactful tool.

As you prepare for your next keynote presentation⁠(opens in a new tab or window), make sure your presentation structure and slide deck design hit on all of the points below. The result? An optimized verbal and visual presentation that's memorable, inspiring, and leaves your audience wanting to hear more from you.

Know Your Audience

Far too many speakers treat their keynote presentation and accompanying slide deck as a set-and-forget presentation, re-using it verbatim regardless of the audience. You may have encountered this yourself as a conference attendee, when the speaker's presentation was clearly written for a different audience, had outdated statistics or advice, or addressed questions or trends that didn't fully apply to you and everyone else in the room.

Before even writing (or re-writing) your presentation and putting together your slides, conduct basic research on who your audience is, their background and goals, their common problems or struggles , and the types of information they might want.

There are a few different ways to do this:

• Ask for basic demographic data (e.g., job roles, expertise, etc.) during the registration process for the event, or request those details from the event organizer.
• Review industry reports, market analyses, case studies, or industry trends for your audience's businesses, job roles, etc.
• Conduct informal or formal interviews of people who will be attending your presentation.

The more you know about your audience, the better you can tailor your verbal and visual messaging to their unique needs.

Set Clear Goals

Goal-setting gives you a target around which to formulate your presentation. It keeps your presentation from meandering aimlessly and ensures that every message, every data point, and every slide has maximum impact.

Your presentation typically needs to take three goals into account:

1. The Event Organizer's Goal

This is especially important if you're presenting as part of a bigger conference. What is the conference's overarching purpose? What has the event organizer promised attendees when it comes to your presentation or breakout session? How do you fit into the broader agenda that’s supporting those goals?Your Goal as the Presenter

2. Your Goal as the Presenter

This may be a combination of professional goals and personal goals, and it's unique to every individual speaker.For instance, you may be speaking to promote a product, to establish your company as an industry leader, or to build your own status as a thought leader in the marketplace.

3. Your Emotional and Thematic Goals

Are you hoping to excite your audience? Entertain them? Shock them? For instance, the emotional goal of a politician trying to drum up votes will be very different from the emotional goal of a TED speaker trying to inspire listeners to action.By understanding the purpose of the event or conference, the goal you have for yourself, and how you want the audience to feel or think, you can position yourself in the area where all three goals overlap.

Structure a Journey

Once you know your audience and where you want to lead them, you can begin to lay out the actual structure of your presentation.

A common critique seen in post-keynote audience surveys is that audiences don't like it when a presenter does a giant brain dump. While statistics, facts, data points, and information are all necessary, simply throwing a stream of information at your listeners does not make for an engaging speech.

Instead, take your audience on a journey. Capture their attention from the get-go, and begin to build anticipation for the destination as you hit your main talking points and flip through your presentation slides.

There are numerous ways you can structure the journey to keep your audience captivated:

1. The Story Structure

This juxtaposes the world as it is with the world as it could be. Start by painting a picture of your audience's current reality. Propose that they could instead live in a better, improved reality and paint a picture of what that alternative looks like.

2. The Roadmap Structure

This is a powerful structure if you're trying to teach a new skill or provide new insights. Start by telling them upfront where they are today (i.e., their problems, their struggles, etc.) and the opportunity that awaits them. You might say, "By the end of this presentation, you'll know how to do X."Then, lead them through a series of steps to the new insight or skill you're teaching.

3. The Hero's Journey

You will often see this structure when keynote speakers draw on their own struggles and experiences to inspire an audience to change, try something new, or shift their perspectives. Explain how you overcame a challenge and the lesson your audience can learn to avoid the same struggle.Whatever your topic, avoid simply stating facts and data or dumping loads of information on your listeners. With the right structure, you promise a payoff if your audience sticks with you, and that promise will keep them engaged as you speak.

Weave in Stories

Society, culture, and the human experience are built around stories. And although clear, informative data and facts are important for driving change and inspiring action, stories remain one of the best ways to keep your audience engaged and help them to embrace what you're saying.

"An organization's stories, and the stories its leaders tell, help solidify relationships in a way that factual statements encapsulated in bullet points or numbers don't," explain psychologists at Harvard Business School⁠(opens in a new tab or window). The goal is to change the target audience’s current attitudes, beliefs, knowledge, and behavior, but “information alone rarely changes any of these. Research confirms that well-designed stories are the most effective vehicle for exerting influence."

For every significant statement or data point you include in your presentation, weave in a personal story or anecdote. This could be a story from your own experience, comments you've overheard, or case studies from industry experts.

The more humanity you can add to your presentation, the more relatable it will be. And the more your audience can relate to what you're presenting, the more engaged they will be, from start to finish.

Provide Guidance for Engagement

• At the beginning, set up your audience to ask questions on the mobile device so that you have a list when it gets to Q&A time
• If you want to capture how people are reacting to your content, solutions like Canva Live⁠(opens in a new tab or window) let your audience send emojis that float up on your presentation screen as you present

Finally, when it comes to structuring and writing your keynote presentation, don't be afraid to include literal cues and prompts that trigger your audience's attention.

You see this all the time, whether it's a church pastor asking to "get an amen," or a TED speaker asking the audience to raise a hand if the problem or challenge they're describing sounds familiar.

At major turning points in your presentation, incorporate an engagement cue, such as:

• "Raise your hand if..."
• "By a round of applause, who has…”
• "Type 'yes' in the chat if..."

Not only does this give you great data points to use in your next keynote, but it also lets your audience engage with you, and ensures they aren't simply passive listeners.

With your overarching presentation structure and messaging down, it's time to design your keynote slides. Don't make the mistake that many speakers do of putting their entire speech into a deck and reading each slide to their audience.

A powerful, memorable visual presentation supports, strengthens, and enhances what you're saying. It's not a replacement for what you're saying, nor is it a script that you're following.

Use the following strategies to optimize your visuals and give each slide some added oomph.

Keep Visuals Consistent

Think of your visual presentation as its own mini brand by creating a style guide that ensures the brand experience is consistent.

Likewise, your visual presentation should have some key brand pillars:

• Set fonts: Switching fonts from slide to slide—or worse, using different fonts on the same slide—creates a chaotic visual experience that comes across as amateurish. Use our font-pairing guide⁠(opens in a new tab or window) to find complementary typefaces.
• Matching font sizes: Make sure the font is big enough for everyone to read easily, including those with vision impairments or audience members at the back of the conference room. (That’s likely bigger than you think.)

• Standard image style: Will you be using illustrations, icons⁠(opens in a new tab or window), or Stock photos⁠(opens in a new tab or window)? Stick with one choice throughout
• Consistent formatting: Is there a background color or photo? Don't switch it up too much. Is there always an icon or image in a particular area? Make sure you don't miss it on random slides. Are you using columns? Paragraphs? Bullet points?

The goal here is consistency: You want your deck to support your presentation, not to be a visual distraction.

Use Text Strategically (and Sparingly)

It’s worth repeating—don't make the common mistake of reading pages of text from your slides as you present.

Any text on your slides should highlight the central fact, idea, shocking twist, or data you are talking about without giving away the entire content of the talk. In general, include as little text as possible and make it large, so the audience can see it and focus on what you’re saying.

In some cases, though, your text may need to be a bit more granular or detailed. For example, if you cite a study in your talk, you might display the study's sourcing and a chart of data that backs up what you’re saying.

However, your audience should never have to read the entire slide to get your main idea. It's very difficult for people to simultaneously listen and read, so make sure you’re not making them choose between reading your slides or listening to you.

Show, Don't Just Tell

Remember the adage that a picture is worth a thousand words? Let photos, illustrations, charts, and graphs paint a picture of what you're saying, instead of merely duplicating what you're saying.

For example, if you're discussing a downward trend in the market, you might show a graph that dramatically reveals how sharp that trend is. Or, if you're talking about customer complaints, you might include a screenshot of negative online reviews.

If you need help creating some stellar visuals for your data, check out our Graph Maker,⁠(opens in a new tab or window) with tons of templates for every kind of data visualization your slides might need.

Use Colors With Intention

For the best results, your keynote slides should look clean and simple and align with:

• Your personal or corporate brand
• The brand of the event you're speaking at, if applicable.

Consult the brand guide for your company or the event, or use our color palette generator⁠(opens in a new tab or window) to create a complementary color batch. Make sure your slides reflect the brand palette. For example, content marketing platform Hubspot uses its telltale branded orange throughout all of its presentations. It's a not-so-subtle reminder to audiences of who is behind the presentation they're viewing.

As with font choices, your colors should also be consistent throughout the presentation slides. If you use a specific color for your headers and footers, all slides with headers and footers should follow the same approach. If you use a certain color to highlight key stats or sentences, keep it consistent every time.

Don't forget readability, either. Your brand palette and visual appeal should never sacrifice readability. Consider how text, charts, images, and fine print look against your slide backgrounds and other design elements. Use contrasting colors (e.g., black on white instead of red on orange) to make the text pop.

To ensure all your presentations have consistent branding, you can set up a Brand Kit in Canva⁠(opens in a new tab or window), setting default fonts, colors, logos, and more to be used on all your presentation slides.

Use Layout to Guide Attention

You structured your speech to take viewers on a journey, so make sure your slide design also guides the audience's eyes to the most important thing you want to highlight.

If someone is taking notes while they're listening to you and they glance up for two seconds to look at your slide, what is the top thing you want them to see and remember?

Use visual hierarchy⁠(opens in a new tab or window) to draw the audience member's eye to the most important part of the slide. Visual hierarchy refers to the flow of the reader's eyes:

• Where does their eye go first?
• Where does their eye go next?
• Where do they end up?

You can play with a few key factors to influence this visual hierarchy and flow:

• Side: Increase the size of a statistic, image, or keyword to increase its visual importance. Decrease its size to downplay it and minimize its importance.
• Color: Darker colors have more visual impact and heaviness, and lighter colors feel less important. Contrasting the two adds more focus to the darker color.
• Spacing and white space: A message or icon surrounded by a lot of white space will jump out to audiences. White space also gives the audience a "path" towards what you want them to look at.

Canva has hundreds of free keynote presentation templates⁠(opens in a new tab or window), so you can find a layout that works for you and begin customizing immediately.

Add Movement

Movement naturally draws the audience's eyes to what requires their attention.

Most speakers are familiar with slide transitions, animated movements that occur when you move from one slide to the next. Keep animated transitions simple. Anything too "flashy" can be distracting or even come across as unprofessional.

But you aren't limited to slide transitions only. For instance, you can use animations⁠(opens in a new tab or window) within a slide to reveal new elements or emphasize them. A short movie clip can be a powerful way to re-engage an audience midway through your presentation, and adding small animated icons or GIFs in your slides can highlight a key fact.

Here’s a fun easter egg: When you’re presenting in Canva, press the C key to send confetti streaming across the screen:

You can also take advantage of implied movement in your slide designs. Angle images or icons so they lead the eye down a slide to your main point. Or, structure rows of text in a way that creates an on-screen pattern (e.g., a zig-zag pattern or a flowing s-shape) that pulls the reader down or across the slide.

Additional Public Speaking Tips

If you're in doubt about anything you include in your presentation, both in your spoken communication and your visual slides, remember: Always emphasize substance over sizzle.

Anyone can look up online videos that teach something basic or provide a quick summary of a complex subject. However, if you want your keynote to be impactful, it needs to go a step further. In today's world, people crave new insights, deep dives into a specific topic or problem, or inspiring personal stories of overcoming a relatable difficulty.

Don't forget to consider audience engagement beyond the confines of your actual keynote slides. How can you extend the life of this presentation you've worked so hard on? How can you expand the conversation and include a wider audience?

You could:

• Invite people to download your presentation for future reference. Build a custom landing page to collect their information. You now have a list of engaged readers ready to learn more about your business or services.
• Include ways for people to follow you online or engage with your topic during and after the presentation. For instance, including a branded Twitter hashtag on your slide can let audiences discuss what you're saying in real-time.
• Remind your audience who you are and who you represent. A company logo and website address on each slide can help.

Standing Ovation

Anyone can deliver a keynote presentation. But only well-prepared communicators, speakers, and business leaders can deliver a keynote presentation that drives results, inspires change, and sticks with their audience long after the presentation is over.

Now that you understand how to use the right cues, storytelling structure, and slide design approaches to keep your audience engaged and focused, you are that well-prepared speaker.

Whether you're starting a new presentation⁠(opens in a new tab or window) from scratch or trying to improve on a previously used talk, use the strategies outlined above to take your next keynote to the next level.