Whether you are a practiced public speaker or not, making a good impression in virtual meetings can be tough. While a lot of the delivery skills you may have practiced for speaking do translate, the virtual space requires a different approach to the use of visual elements and audience interaction to accommodate its unique makeup. That may mean learning to balance your personal visibility with the delivery of visual aids, or it might mean learning to change the way you give the audience space to react and process. Here are some quick tips for success:
- Connect meeting tools smoothly by using support apps within a single ecosystem when you need to bring in outside tools like slide shows
- Put out questions and wait for responses, create polls people can answer silently, and design other interactive aspects to the presentation that make use of the digital tools available so you are connecting with less outgoing audience members as well as those who are vocal
- Build your content to be video-ready so that recordings are accessible to those who want to review the presentation you give
- Make the experience more immersive by using tools like custom backgrounds and visual aids to add depth to the experience and engage multiple senses
Start by looking at your options for a Zoom immersive view backgrounds download, then brainstorm ways to personalize it to your company or team brand.
Personalize Your Virtual Background
Once you have a starter background, it will need some customization to reflect your brand and your presentation’s message. It may help to create a consistent personal background and then use foreground graphics with transparent backgrounds to make it easy to change things up for each new presentation topic. Make sure your choices for both the consistent background and the individual meeting’s graphics match your branding to keep your voice consistent. If necessary, review how to add virtual background in Teams ahead of the presentation to be sure you are ready to smoothly integrate it when it’s your time to speak.
Get Your Whole Team on Board
One of the best ways to be more engaging to a wider audience is to prepare for multiple presenters and to build interaction between them. Get your team involved and prepare a more roundtable approach to help ensure you have the variety to engage outside audience members. People are more likely to answer questions when you have a warm-up answer from another presenter who throws it out to them after their own participation, too.
Bringing your team into the presentation means setting up a consistent approach to visual displays and the use of outside tools, and that starts by learning how to mirror virtual background in Google Meet and Microsoft Teams. That way, every presenter in your lineup winds up working against the same branded background, giving your virtual presentation the same consistent staging you would use at a live in-person event. The effect on your audience will be much the same, which empowers you as a speaker by putting them in the frame of mind they already feel familiar with.