You Will Fail to Attract Your Audience if You Don’t Do This

This article is part of Communicate Better Series. 9 simple steps to giving great presentation will give you a better idea .

This article is not about how to design a rocket. Neither is this about finding the purpose of your life. These things are tough. Finding why you are giving that presentation is much easy. It is crucial for you to know the purpose of the speech. Why are you giving this presentation? What is the message of the talk? Questions like these seem to be common sense to most of us and yet amazingly high number of people don’t think about it.

Why find the purpose

Finding the purpose of the talk can be enlightening. It helps you understand your audience and their needs. Once you know the purpose of the speech, your speech will get a focus and will help you to be organize your speech better.

How to find the purpose

As said earlier, finding the purpose of your talk isn’t rocket science – this is much simpler. In this post, four basic questions are presented. These questions, in my personal opinion, are simple to answer and I have found them useful in discovering the purpose of my speech. These questions are:

1. What is the occasion – If you know what the occasion for your speech is you will get some idea what type of talk will your audience expect. If the occasion is an engineering research conference, you can expect the audience to be knowledgeable about engineering. This would help you to focus your speech on engineering or related areas.

2. What are you trying to do – Do you want to inform the audience? Or is there something you are trying to sell? Ask yourself, what are you trying to do with your speech. Once you have the answer, use it to build your talk.

3. What do you want your audience to do – After the speech is over, what do you want your audience to do? Do you want them to give you or your organization some donation (persuasive speech) or do you want them to feel good about themselves (motivational speech)?

4. What is your message – At the end of the day, you do want to convey an idea or a thought with your speech. Maybe you want to ask your audience to save energy or raise awareness about driving safe, whatever your message is, identify it before you start your research.

These are few questions that can help you to determine the purpose of your talk. Use these four simple questions wisely. You can develop your own questions based on the questions mentioned above.

Once you have found the purpose, follow the next steps to make your presentation effective.

How do you do it?

Do you have any questions you ask every time you want to find out your purpose? What are some questions you have found useful? Any other questions you want to add to this list?

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