In a recent Frost & Sullivan survey, we found that 51% of professionals are working while watching presentations and 34% are checking email or texting.

While we’ll never be able to minimize that number to 0%, we can impact it by carefully crafting and curating the presentation experience through purposeful multimedia experiences.

This post takes a quick look at three ways to incorporate a more inclusive online experience to ameliorate your presentations.

1. Walk the audience through real-life workshops/demos

Roger Courville, the Chief Aha! Guy at The Virtual Presenter, recently delivered a presentation where he showcased the dilemma of content promise vs. actual delivery. Part of his story was the importance of delivering what you promise so he took the audience through his own abstract and explained how each section of his presentation addressed each promise.

This is a great tactic to demonstrate what you’re talking about. It’s really easy to speak in high-level generalities, but audiences often need real examples to fully understand the concepts.

2. Use the “Show & Tell” tactic

This may be an older example, but it’s still one of our favorites. In 2013 Qualys hosted a live hack webinar to highlight how hackers actually break into web applications in real time. Through screen sharing they were able to walk the audience through the experience and help them understand the immense threat companies are always under.

What an effective way to get your audience to watch your presentation and see how it’s done!

3. Illustrate the power of your product demos

One of our clients, Uberflip, always does a product demo after the Q&A in their presentations — a brilliant strategy in our opinion. Their structure puts their audience first but still highlights the value they can provide.

Here’s the typical structure of their presentations:

· Trusted Uberflip employee introduces the topic
· Partner provides practical, innovative advice to improve their day-to-day tasks
· Q&A
· Uberflip demo

What they’ve done is created trust with the audience before pitching them – permission-based marketing if you will. Too many presentations jump into pitches and immediately lose viewership. Uberflip provides real value to their audience and answers their questions before shifting into their product sell. This lets the viewer own the journey – allowing them to decide when they’re ready to tune into the product demo.

All of these tactics are great ways to upgrade your presentations to maintain audience interest and engagement. However, the most critical thing is to thoughtfully add screen shares into your presentation. Make sure to have a purpose when leveraging this tool. When done correctly, you can create a multimedia presentation that inspires and captivates your audience.