Storytelling Presentation Guide for Professionals

How to better connect with your audience with storytelling.

Have you ever given a presentation or a live demo but couldn’t seem to break through to your audience? Chances are you lost them because you failed to create a storytelling presentation.

Your audience will forget an estimated 90% of your presentation if you fail to structure it in a way they can understand and that holds their attention. So whether you’re presenting over Zoom or in person, storytelling is a great way to keep your audience captivated, evoke emotions, break down complex ideas, and inspire action. The following Storytelling Presentation Guide for Professionals will help you implement storytelling in your presentations and take them from boring to memorable.

1. What Is Storytelling?
2. What Are the Main Benefits of Storytelling?
3. How Do You Write a Storytelling Presentation?
4. Six Types of Story Structures
5. Types of Presentation Structures
6. How to Prepare for a Storytelling Presentation
7. Storytelling Presentation Services

What Is Storytelling?

Storytelling is the art of using oral or written words to share stories or narratives for purposes of entertainment, education, cultural preservation, or moral guidance. In cultures around the world, storytelling has been used since the dawn of time as a way for people to relate to the world around them. Today, good storytelling is often a valued method of communication because it helps people to understand one another.

In presentations, storytelling has the ability to tap into the human psyche in a way that regular old slides cannot. Storytelling converts facts into something memorable and engaging for your audience.

The reason? It’s science: NPR reports that storytelling lights up several different areas of the brain, including those involved with language processing and other neural circuits, along with emotion processing and movement. Think about the last time a story moved you to tears or laughter, they touch us in a way pure data or reason cannot.

What Are the Main Benefits of Storytelling?

The list of benefits of storytelling is long. In addition to making a presentation memorable and relatable, stories can:

• Convey new subject matter or complex ideas simply, making it easy for people to understand and retain the information. It’s the opposite of using industry jargon — a presentation misstep — which can turn off your audience if they feel like they can’t grasp the concepts you’re presenting.
• Make data more interesting. Presentations that consist only of data can be tedious and boring, but adding storytelling helps liven things up and gives meaning to the data you’re presenting.
• Create an emotional connection with your audience, persuading them to embrace your ideas.
• Humanize your brand or organization, making you more relatable, a concept you can see played out on social media.
• Keep your audience’s attention throughout the presentation.

How Do You Write a Storytelling Presentation?

When you’re ready to get started with a storytelling presentation, I recommend reading our article on how to write a presentation from scratch, but here are some general tips to keep in mind:

• Have an end goal in mind. In storytelling presentation writing, know what you want the audience to experience and how you want them to react once your story is over.
• Think about the structure of your story. Like all creative endeavors, presentations are about shaping a story for your audience so that it’s memorable and meaningful for them. (We’ll get into story structures next.)
• Don’t start in slideware like PowerPoint, Google Slides, or Keynote. Instead, start your story as an outline in Word or Docs before putting it into your slide deck so you’re sure to cover the key points.
• Fill in your outline with the big ideas you want to cover in each slide, like plot points that move your story forward.

6 Types of Story Structures

When it comes to storytelling, you have a lot of options for structuring your presentation. Here six few tried-and-true structures that will get you confident in the art of telling a good tale:

1. The hero’s journey, aka monomyth. An ordinary person embarks on an extraordinary journey into the unknown, faces challenges, and returns transformed.
2. The mountain. You set the scene and build suspense, describing how you overcame several small challenges that lead up to one final challenge.
3. The 3 act structure. This is perhaps the most common way to plan out the trajectory of a story. Act 1 is your inciting incident, Act 2 provides rising action and continues to build tension, and finally the story ends with a climax in Act 3.
4. Rags to riches. Just like it sounds, you describe a main character’s hardships and journey to fame or success.
5. Petal. Tell multiple stories that relate to your main message. While the stories might appear unconnected and have different characters, they all relate back to your central idea.
6. In medias res, or “in the middle of things.” Dive right into the action, explain the events that led up to this event, and create suspense that leads up to explaining how you got there and what you learned.

There are many other types of story structures to consider, but these structures will give you a good starting point. Later, you can tweak your approach to include other types of stories.

Types of Presentation Structures

Within the context of your story structure or for certain subtopics, it can be helpful to think about ways to organize information for maximum impact and clarity. Select your organizational structure based on which one makes the most sense to support your main story. Here are several that I find particularly useful.

• Chronological: in the order in which events occurred
• Sequential: in a step-by-step order
• Spatial: arranged according to how things relate together in a physical space
• Climactic: in order of least to most importance

For more persuasive presentations, you can consider using these structures:

• Problem-solution: state the problem and your solution to it
• Compare-contrast: describe how two or more things are different or similar
• Cause-effect: show different causes and effects in various situations
• Advantage-disadvantage: offer pros and cons within two categories

How to Prepare for a Storytelling Presentation

No matter how prepared you are, public speaking can be challenging. Being prepared will help you feel confident and relaxed when giving your presentation. Here are some tips for how to make sure you’re ready for your big day:

• Practice beforehand by presenting in front of friends and family or even a mirror. You can also record or film yourself delivering it aloud so that you can hear how it sounds and looks to an audience member.
• Connect with your audience by smiling and making eye contact throughout your presentation. If you can, tailor your story to appeal to your audience’s interests or concerns, or find ways to include them in the story itself.
• Avoid common presentation mistakes, like cluttered slides or no defined end goal. Our article on presentation mistakes to avoid gives you the complete rundown.

Storytelling Presentation Services

With our Storytelling Presentation Guide, you should feel prepared to communicate with your audience through a medium they are familiar with — and one that will grab their attention by telling a compelling story that expresses the unique benefits of your brand or business.

At Studio E6, we can help you craft a storytelling presentation that hooks your audience and keeps them engaged throughout your entire talk.

Go to https://studioe6.com/services/ to learn more about our services or https://studioe6.com/contact-us/ to contact us and get started.