Designing your presentations with the audience in mind engages them and draws a more concentrated focus on your presentation as a whole. Using an audience-focused approach is like proactive market research. Thinking from your diverse audience’s point of view to drive your design.
I call this strategy the “Breadcrumb Approach.” Basically, we are throwing out a breadcrumb one at a time to try to get the audience to move toward us. Most presenters use a “Push” strategy. They push their ideas and content onto the audicne (whether the audience wants it or not.)
Make Your Presentations Really Audience-Focused – Get People to Want to Listen to Your Presentation
Why It Matters
Presenters need to both engage people quickly and also give enough information that their audience is knowledgeable. Take the perspective of your audience and remember that attention span. If you spend too long getting to the point, the attention will move elsewhere. If you seem wishy-washy or have a Swiss-Cheese approach, you’ve lost them.
Here is what most people do when they design a presentation. (Don’t do this.) First, they start designing the slideshow or visual aid. They try to identify everything that they know about the topic. By the way, we do this because we often think that if we don’t tell the audience everything, we have failed as a speaker. (The opposite is true, though.)
Next, they go through each slide and try to figure out what they will say about each visual aid. Then, in the final step, they practice the entire speech and realize it is way too long. So, they cut stuff from the speech to fit the timeframe. (Thus, the Swiss-Cheese analogy.)
This preparation takes a LOT of time. The process is also very, very difficult.
Focus on the Audience Makes Your Job as the Presenter MUCH Easier.
Begin your design process with the audience in mind. Think about what they need to know. What is most important to the audience? Assume that your audience will only remember a small portion of your content. Prioritize those things by importance. Make the first bullet the absolute most important item the audience wants or needs to know. Make the second-most important bullet number two. Etc.
Think about your presentation as a marketing campaign. You have to tailor the message to the market you are presenting to. Will your intended audience care about what you are presenting? Remember, your audience is the most important part your presentation. If they don’t need the content of your presentation, don’t bother standing up.
By the way, when you think like your audience, you’ll simultaneously become a more effective communicator. A more centralized focus creates a well-organized outline to present from. It provides an opportunity to share so much information without overloading your listeners.
Make Your Presentation Audience Focused.
If your audience is only going to remember a few items that you cover anyway, why not focus just on the things that are most important?
“But wait, Doug… Doesn’t that mean that my speech is going to be too short?”
Well, no. Instead of covering 30 bullet points in a quick cursory fashion that will be confusing, cover a few points really well. For instance, let’s say you have 30 minutes to present. If you try to cover 30 points, you can only spend one minute. You have less time if you do any type of introduction or conclusion. However, if you have just five points, you can spend five to seven minutes expanding on each point.
Audiences like examples. If you explain each point and give them an example or story for each, you should hit the timeframe pretty closely.
Here are a few ways to gear your presentation toward what the audience wants.
1) Use the “Do I Give a Flip?” Test.
Okay, yes, it is a crude statement, but it will help you eliminate boring and uninteresting distractions from the presentation. Look just at your first slide. If this slide is all the audience saw when they walked into the room, would they say, “I can’t wait to hear this speech?” Or would they say, “Ugh, not again”? If it is the latter, your presentation doesn’t pass the test.
Here is a good example. Let’s say you are teaching your team how to use new software that your company purchased. You might be tempted to title the presentation…
“Why You Should Use the New Software.”
Human nature will kick in. Audience members will often respond by thinking, “Who are you to tell me what I NEED to do?” Or they may think something like, “Why are you wasting my time with a cryptic title? Why don’t you just tell me versus telling me that you are going to tell me?”
Instead, a title like “The New Software Will Help You Save Time and Reduce Errors” will get a better response. The new title will have the audience thinking, “Well, I want to save time. I also want to reduce errors. I’ll listen for a little while, I guess.”
We just want to throw a single breadcrumb out and get the audience moving our way.
2) Focus on What The Audience Wants, Not What You Want.
Make sure to focus on what the audience wants to know about the topic. A lot of times, we focus on ourselves. Instead, pretend that you are an audience member. Get into that person’s head. Determine what he/she wants from the speech.
I was coaching an engineering firm for a sales presentation a few years ago. Their first main slide had bullet point number one listed as “Our Experience.” Their thought was that their experience was what set them apart from their competition. While that is a true statement, they would be spending the first part of the presentation bragging.
They wanted to focus on this continent, but the audience, a local school district, had other wants. We ended up identifying three major needs of the school district. They had to keep the project under budget. They also needed the project to not have a delay in the schedule. (If a new school isn’t completed by July or August, they lose the use of that building for a whole other year.) The third thing was safety. Some of the work would be remodeling schools in the district. The School Board needed to make sure the kids would be safe during the remodeling.
Once we identified these main wants and needs of the School Board, the team used their experience to prove each point. They proved they could stay under budget by telling the board case studies of other districts they worked for. When they got to the schedule bullet point, they used their experience as proof as well. Guess what? They also used their experience to prove that the kids would be safe.
By focusing on what the audience wanted, they were able to use the entire presentation to cover what they wanted.
3) Make Your Title and Bullet Points “Result Oriented.”
Instead of making the bullet be a piece of data or idea that you want the person to understand, focus on the benefit that the person will receive if he/she understands the data or the idea.
When I first created the Fearless Presentations ® public speaking class, I made a big mistake. I titled the sessions based on what was covered in the session. This sounds logical but had an unintended consequence. For instance, one lesson was called “The Three-Point Talk.” Class members would come back from the last break, look at the title, and scrunch their eyes together in confusion.
You see, no one knew what the heck a three-point talk was.
So, instead, I had to ask, “What is the main benefit that people receive from understanding the Three Point Talk?” Well, when people get really good at this process, they can design entire presentations very quickly — in minutes versus hours or days. So, we re-titled the speech “A Simple Way to Design Presentations in 15 Minutes or Less”. Focus on the result, and your audience will focus on your presentation.
You want to do something similar. For each of the main items in your outline, ask yourself why the audience needs to know these things. Why would the audience care about this bullet point? Whatever the answers are to those questions needs to be included in the bullet point. (In many cases, the result or the “takeaway” can replace the bullet point.
4) Allow Your Presentation to Solve Their Problems.
You’ll notice that each of the suggestions above has a single thing in common. Each suggestion helps you focus on solutions for your audience.
Think about your audience and whether your presentation meets their specific needs. Approach your presentation as if you have a solution instead of an idea. Is your most important information shared in a way that solves an audience’s needs? Or are you having to overtly sell yourself?
The goal of your presentation should be to help the audience solve a problem. If the content of your presentation doesn’t help your audience solve or avoid a problem, well… Skip the presentation. You are just wasting everybody’s time.
Sometimes, I will have class members tell me, “My presentation isn’t designed to persuade. I just need to inform.”
My question at this point is always, “Why?”
“Because my audience needs to know this information.”
“Why? Why do they need to know this?”
If they can’t come up with a good response, the presentation probably isn’t going to go very well.
Here is an example. “I’m giving a project report. My boss just needs to know how the project is going.”
“Why?”
She mainly wants to know if we are on schedule and staying within the budget.”
Ding, ding, ding. Make your bullet points show these things. It is actually pretty easy to design presentations when you start with helping the audience solve a problem.
We cover these and dozens of additional public speaking tips in our public speaking workshop held in dozens of cities around the world every couple of months.
