Creating compelling content

Grant Leboff: Simon, let’s assume someone’s got the message and they understand what they want to get across. They’ve got some idea of a narrative. How do they start to put something together that’s going to be compelling for the audience?

Simon Morton: They’ve done the hard work, that’s the exciting thing and if they understand their audience, they’ve got the key message they want to share with that audience. It’s now about choosing the right content to support that message. That can be done in a number of different ways. One is probably going through existing content you already have and picking through, saying: that would help me in that argument, that would help me communicate that with the audience.

One of the challenges that people tend to face is that they will measure the robustness of their presentation by the number of slides and how much content sits within the presentation. There’s a phrase that I stole that makes it into the book which is: simplicity is not stupidity. It’s a drummers mantra. For me it really nailed what helps people really get to the core of a great presentation which is, don’t over analyse, don’t over complicate. If you can make it simple so your audience understands it, then you’re on the right road.

If you ever feel like you’re adding a little bit too much icing to the cake, get rid of the icing. You don’t need that.

Grant Leboff: You talk about looking at some of the content you’ve already got and picking out which is going to support what I’m saying which is an aid to that. What in those situations, where you haven’t got any content, you’re talking about a new product or a new service or a new idea or whatever it is. How would you then start to put something together that will support the other aspects of the presentation?

Simon Morton: It’s difficult to say without particular examples, but that message will always have come from the results of content being created. It might be a concept that you’re looking for seed funding for. Well there was a problem that you were looking to fix with this concept of a product that you’re looking for investment for. Go back to that. Demonstrate the size of the issue. Demonstrate why now is the time for this particular seed investment to come round. Go dig a little deeper, but don’t over analyze it.

So, for example, taking that investor presentation example, if I’m looking to potentially invest in a product, I want to know that there’s IP around it. I want to know that there are some patents around it. That’s fine. That’s good to know. Most importantly I want to know there’s a problem it’s fixing. Go back to your audience. Go back to the message that you’re looking to get across and then build up your story from there.

There may be small changes to the spoken word in this transcript in order make it more readable.