As an experienced marketer, you are going to be asked to give many presentations at work, as well as at industry events. Due to this, you are going to need to learn how to create a great presentation as well as learn how to speak in public.

Mastering your public speaking skills is a daunting task, but much of a good marketing presentation can be attributed to well written content and the ability to sell yourself and your ideas.  For example, you might be passionate about wanting your peers to understand what social media mistakes they should avoid. Whatever ideas you want to convey, they will only be well received if you know how to communicate them effectively.

But where do you start in developing great written content for your business presentation?  The best way to start is by outlining your public speech.

Create An Outline

The first step in outlining your speech is what is called the “Brain Dump”.  According to the public speaking website Motivational Speakers, they suggest that you begin by writing down everything that is relevant to your topic that you can think of.  You might or might not end up including everything you list in your presentation – that isn’t the point.  The point is to create a list of everything that might or might not be pertinent to your public speaking presentation.

Research Your Topic

Once you’ve listed out everything that you can think of, research your topic to find potential areas that you’ve missed.  You can research other blogs or emails that you get to make sure you are covering every aspect of the topic.  You are trying to ascertain any topics that you might not have thought of that are relevant to your public speaking topic.

Throughout the course of this stage, don’t worry about how the outline is coming along.  Don’t worry about how it appears, or if everything is worded correctly.  “Whatever you do don’t try to be a perfectionist right away” says coach Alex Miller of the Coaching Institute. “The goal is to get as much information listed as possible and worry about the formatting and details later.  Grammar, punctuation, syntax – none of this is important in the early stages of your outline.”  Don’t move on to the next stage until you feel confident you have a comprehensive list of ideas and topics that pertain to your public speech.

Shaping Your Outline

Now you can begin to gather all of your information into an outline form.  With a clear goal, your outline will begin to take shape quickly.  Look through everything that you’ve listed, and try to develop themes that come out of the content.  Assign every piece of information a theme that it corresponds with.  You should be left with a collection of themes, with all of your content fitting into one of the themes.  This is a mandatory part of presentation skills training – coalescing your thoughts into themes.

This is the point where you want to remove duplicate content, and strike any content you deem negligible from the outline.  You don’t want duplicate content to show up in your presentation, as it will bore the audience, and does not support you as the expert.  And, while it is essential to provide your listeners with a presentation full of great content, you need to remove content that isn’t directly pertinent to your presentation topic.

Take a moment to review your outline.  Does it cover all of the topics you feel are important?  Is there adequate information under each theme, capable of supporting each statement that you want to make?  Is there duplicate or extraneous content that might benefit from being removed?  Or, on the other hand, would your outline benefit from more content nestled under one or many themes?

The art of public speaking requires a good presentation outline, as this creates the framework for quality content and delivery.  Take the time to create a comprehensive outline that highlights the themes you want to present on, and the supporting evidence and statements you want to touch on.