Stop starting your presentations in the wrong place.
When I was preparing for a recent workshop, I got to thinking that most of us put the wrong information on our first slide. Hands up if you’ve started a presentation with your bio or a list of contents.
Photo by Marcos Luiz Photograph on Unsplash
Maybe we’re nervous. Maybe we’re suffering from fraudulent writer complex and we feel we have to justify why we’re the one presenting today (and not some other, much more famous author). We need to justify the fee people have paid or the fact that they’re about to give us their attention for an hour or two. So, we should start with who we are, right? And why we’re qualified to talk on this subject. Or the list of contents. That has to be a good option; the key to good communication is clarity, isn’t it?
Want to grow your audience? You need a compelling brand message.
Yes, clarity and laying out where you’re going in a talk is crucial, but I want to suggest a different approach for your opening gambit. One that will get your audience on board straight away. Whether it’s a book-related event, a workshop, a school visit or training that you give to supplement your work as a writer, this simple principle is applicable to all these scenarios.
Just like the first pages of your novel, the first few minutes of your presentation has to grab your audience’s attention. You don’t have to tell a joke, say something controversial or be the world’s greatest expert on the topic to do that.
So, what do you need to do? Start with your audience. As you’ll know if you’ve read any of my other blog posts, I’m a big believer in empathy as the cornerstone to decent marketing. And a presentation is no different. If you start with your audience rather than yourself, you communicate some important messages right off the bat. Messages which will get the attention of your listeners:
- I care about you
- I understand
- This is for you
If your audience had any hesitation before the presentation, this will put them at ease and make them more open to listening. Here are a few ways you to make sure your talk is audience-centric from the start:
RESEARCH
If this approach is going to be authentic, you do have to actually know your audience, as much as you can. There’s nothing worse than sounding empathetic but not hitting any of the issues your audience is interested in. Ask the organizer (if it’s not you) about the anticipated size and demographics of the attendees.
Think, imagine, ask other authors, or better yet, ask your target audience:
- what are their challenges and their desires
- what will distract or put them off
START WITH A QUESTION
If you have a small group, you can ask directly and wait for responses. With a mid-sized group, or a group of school students, you can get them to share their answers with a partner or small group then ask a spokesperson to feed back one answer. With a large conference you probably won’t have the time or set up to ask individuals to shout out their answers. In that case, you could start your presentation with a question you often get asked.
When I had a Skype call arranged with two classes of school children, I asked the teacher to gather five questions from students and select students to ask them at the start of the lesson. It proved to be an effective way to engage young listeners and you can read about it here. It was also the way I began my most recent workshop on marketing for writers. I fought with myself preparing this last presentation; I went back and forth between starting with a question and starting with my bio. So imagine my delight when a writer approached me at the end of the talk to say,
“everything you told us to do – to show empathy, to ask our readers questions, to put our readers first – you did all of that in your presentation. Thank you.”
One writer even went to the trouble of blogging about my workshop. I was bowled over! Thank you, Don.
By the way, make a note of the questions you get asked and aim to refer back to them as you go if they’re not already covered in your pre-prepared material. Ideally, make sure there’s a Q&A at the end of your workshop.
PAINT A PICTURE
Give your attendees a visual of where they will be at the end of the presentation. This creates vision and builds expectation. As Dale Carnegie says in The Quick & Easy Way to Effective Speaking:
“Pictures. Pictures. Pictures. They are as free as the air you breathe. Sprinkle them through your talks, your conversation, and you will be more entertaining, more influential.”
I can find it intimidating to try and think of a metaphor for everything I’m going to communicate in a workshop. If that’s the case, don’t force it. It can be prosaic, but make sure you paint a picture of where your listeners will be at the end of your talk.
Want to grow your audience? You need a compelling brand message.
EXPLAIN THE EXPERIENCE OR BENEFIT
To make this mental picture really meaningful, describe the benefit the listener will get from your talk, not the contents. This is another foundational principle of effective marketing and you can read more about it here. Your audience hasn’t come to your workshop for information. They’ve come for some sort of experience, be that entertainment, confidence, reassurance, clarity, peace of mind. They want to go away with something they didn’t have before. You can frame this as a question: “Would you like to be able to …? Well, by the end of this presentation you will have …”
Once you’ve described where you’re going to take your listeners, ask them if they’re happy with that. This gets their agreement that they know what to expect and their engagement will be higher.
It’s at this point that you can move onto introducing yourself or the topics you will cover in your talk. Once again, when it comes to your bio, don’t be chronological. Too many of us fall into that trap. Start with your audience – what they want to know, what they need to know. If you’d like some help building a bio that’s reader-focused, sign up to my monthly newsletter and you’ll get my FREE resource HOW TO WRITE YOUR BEST BIO.
Just like our bios, it’s tempting to start our presentations in the wrong place – with ourselves. For sure, there are gifted speakers who do this well, but many of us haven’t had years of practise. So, next time you have a presentation to give, try beginning with your listeners and let me know how it goes.
If you’d like help planning a presentation or engaging with your audience, please get in touch, I’d love to help.
Leave A Comment