How to know your audience (and why you should)
He just wanted to be done.
Kevin had spent weeks working on his presentation before working with me. I understood why he was anxious to wrap up the content development process and move on to crafting the deck and practicing delivering the presentation itself.
But it was imperative that we stop and think about his audience before moving forward.
Why it’s important to know and understand your audience for presentations—even ones you give often
Bad news, friends: there’s no cruise control for presentations. You can’t just “set it and forget it” and expect to be equally effective in every situation. Kevin was working on a presentation that he’d be delivering to multiple audiences over the course of six months in an effort to raise funds for a new business. So, naturally, he wanted to develop the content and a corresponding deck and then simply deliver the same presentation time and again. A lot of my clients—across industry, presentation purpose, and role—share Kevin’s goal of developing a talk they’ll deliver repeatedly.
But I always advise them not to.
A “stock presentation” has several potential pitfalls:
- The content swells: In order to have a single narrative and single deck, Kevin had to prepare for every possible question that might surface when he delivered the content. While we do need to be well-versed in our subject matter, we cannot expect to cover every possible facet in the time allotted for a single presentation. By knowing the audience, we are able to select the appropriate content to fit within their time constraints and meet their objectives.
- We miss the mark: If you don’t know who your audience is, how could you possibly know what they need from you? When we craft a presentation without giving purposeful thought to who will be in the audience, then we’re really only serving ourselves—not serving the people in attendance. If your goal is to hear yourself talk… well, then… I guess you’ll nail it. But if you hope to advance your idea for the sake of those impacted by it, then you’ll need to identify their needs and tailor your content to them specifically.
- Our delivery becomes static and stale: When we dust off the same talk over and over—even to a new audience—we run the risk of sounding robotic because we’ve memorized the content. By tailoring the content to the specific audience, we’ll go “off script” and the tone will be more conversational… which is usually more effective. (When I ask people why they found a speech or presentation engaging, they almost always comment on it “feeling conversational.”)
How to know your audience
Ideally, Kevin wouldn’t have started crafting his presentation before taking the time to get to know his audience. I always encourage my clients to go through an audience analysis exercise before they craft any content (download my free worksheet). Yet there are instances—raising funds or campaigning for office or sharing an inspirational story based on a life experience—where speakers do need to deliver a similar message repeatedly. Either at the beginning of the process, or when preparing to share an existing talk with a new audience, I recommend speakers ask themselves at least these three questions to tailor their content:
1 What is unique about this person or group? Identify what makes this audience different from others you might present to. Do some research to learn about them. If you don’t know the person/people you’ll be in front of, who do you know that does know them?
2 What does this person or group most need right now? Evaluate their felt needs and craft your content to support them with your expertise. When you need to deliver an existing message to a new group, determine what you need to cut, supplement, or rearrange according to their specific needs. Sometimes we’ll be speaking to the same group of people but they need something different from us than the last time we spoke to them. Examples of this include the second or subsequent meeting with a prospective investor (same overall message and goal, same audience but with different level of detail for due diligence) or leadership urging team members to take the next step and persevere in a lengthy change effort (same long-term goal, same audience, but different emotional need; check out this HBR article for more).
3 What will their objections to my idea be—and what are the underlying reasons they’d resist me? Certainly, we’d like to overcome their objections with our content, but the goal of asking ourselves this question before we begin is to establish empathy for our audience.
Empathy is the key to knowing and meeting our audience’s needs
Each of the questions above leverages our ability to imagine what life might be like in the other person’s shoes. We need to care about our audiences—no matter the format or topic. We won’t get it right 100% of the time. Probably not even 80% of the time. But by purposefully trying to understand the audience, we will be operating from a posture of humility and service. That posture is more effective (we all feel it when we’re in the audience) and helps manage speaking anxiety.
It’s also just the right thing to do.
Grab my free audience analysis worksheet here.