Types of presentations

Presentations are used in almost every sphere, be it business presentation, education, or even entertainment. Naturally, there’s no single solution for a presentation. In fact, there’s a lot of things to consider when you choose the types of presentation. While your presentation’s goal certainly matters, there’s also the visuals, the lengths, the type of presentation style and a lot of other features to consider. In other words, that’s a lot to choose from. How to figure out what suits you best among the types of PowerPoint presentation? Let’s review some of the common ones and you’ll certainly get some fresh ideas!

Type 1: Elevator Pitch

One of the most common types of presentations in business, the elevator pitch is quick, informative, and incredibly versatile. It derives its name from the business world, where sometimes you only have time during the elevator ride to present your idea and persuade your potential investor. The initial type of presentation in business doesn’t actually require slides, since it is basically a speech lasting up to three minutes that explains your idea and its benefits. However, in a broader sense, it is a name used for short presentations up to 10 slides, describing the main points and having minimal visual support, mostly centered around simple infographics or graphs.

Type 2: Informative presentation

This type of presentation is usually a longer one, and naturally it contains a lot of information, since its goal is to inform the audience on a subject. This is probably the most common type of presentation style for college, but it is widely used in business as well, mainly for internal tasks, like explanation of the changes in company’s structure etc. This type of presentation usually features a lot of text and may also include rather complex visuals. So, there’s naturally a risk of being really boring. A good thing to do in this presentation type is to try to make it interactive – ask questions, add some videos and so on.

Type 3: Storytelling

Another great type of presentation in business (or actually any other sphere) is the storytelling presentation type. In essence, it is a presentation built like a story — where your points are illustrated by examples, either from your life or from life in general. This presentation type is usually heavy on text content, but using visuals in support can make for a much better experience. Even the most interesting story might be rather dull when it is too long. Using media may present a great distraction for your audience that would, however, still keep them on track.

Type 4: Visual presentation

This presentation is where the text part gives way to the visuals. Graphs, infographics, videos and pictures, visualization powerpoint — everything that can illustrate your point properly will fit. This type of PowerPoint presentation is probably the most captivating for the audience and certainly the most good looking. To succeed with this presentation, you’ll have to use visuals that would require minimum explanation. To a certain extent, such presentations can actually present themselves with little participation of a speaker. Your task as a presenter here is to guide the audience through your amazing visuals.

Type 5: Roadmap presentation

A rather innovative and mostly a type of presentation in business, the Roadmap is built to show how to get to the objective. For presentation design service an objective is usually presented at the beginning, and the whole presentation basically consists of the milestones that should be achieved on the way to said objective. Among the different types of presentation, this one is really heavy on infographics. What is more, there’s plenty of opportunities here to experiment with unusual slide layouts and the continuity of images on slides, since such presentations tend to follow the “road” structure and use the road imagery in the design.

Type 6: Problem solving presentation

As you have probably guessed, in this presentation your content would be built around a certain problem for which you then design a solving strategy. It is a pretty universal type of presentation since it can be used in pretty much every sphere. What is especially good about this presentation is that you can apply any of the problem-solving techniques to it, which makes you really flexible in terms of structure. What is more, the problem might (and actually should) resonate with the audience, increasing the involvement and interest in what you are talking about.

Type 7: Instructor presentation

This presentation type is quite similar to the informative presentation: there’s lots of content and a lot of text to deliver in your speech. It is a perfect type of presentation for really complex topics that require high levels of understanding from both the audience and the presenter. Instructor presentations usually feature quite a lot of visual support and are longer than the average presentations. While it may be hard to make the presentation as light as for example the elevator pitch or a visual presentation, it is better to reserve this style for the subjects in which both you and your audience are greatly interested. You can also use professional presentation services to help you with it.

Type 8: Text only presentation

At first glance it may seem like a really bad idea, but who said that text can’t look beautiful? Text only presentation allows you to throw away all the unnecessary elements and make the audience focus entirely on your content. Keep in mind that this presentation type doesn’t suggest that you should use walls of text and bore your audience to death. On the contrary, you can conveniently organize your text into bullet points and one-sentence statements that can be a great backbone to your speech.

In conclusion

There’s no shortage of presentation types and creative ideas. Depending on the type of your content and the message that you convey you can choose any of them. But what is more, you can combine them as well, creating a unique and engaging work that would really impress your audience!  We really hope that this article will give you some ideas of where to start with your presentation and what path to choose .