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This is the second part of the Presentation Foundation Series and will cover your presentation audience. In this first video about audience, you’ll learn the first of three things that are important to know about your presentation audience. I’ll show you 8 essential questions you must answer if you want to have a successful presentation. Knowing your presentation audience and what their possible motivations are for listening to your presentation is critical to having a successful presentation. In other words, DO NOT skip this step!
Please check out the video or skip down to read more.
If YouTube is unavailable in your area, please click the following link to watch or right-click to download: Presentation Foundation Series – What You Must Know About Your Audience Video 1: 8 Essential Questions
Video length 1:52 (Click CC for captions or read transcript below)
Special thanks again to Powtoon (http://www.powtoon.com) for making this video possible.
Before we start, if you haven’t seen the three videos about what a presentation must do, then have a look at those by clicking the following:
- What a Presentation Must Do Video 1: Are You Entertained?
- What a Presentation Must Do Video 2: Reward
- What a Presentation Must Do Video 3: Create Action
Why people mess up their presentations
The most common mistake I see when consulting people or companies on their presentations is that the presenter doesn’t give enough thought or consideration into who his or her audience is. Almost everyone I meet spends way too much time focusing on what he or she wants to say and not enough on what the audience wants to hear. This is a critical mistake.
In fact, knowing your audience is one of the most important, if not the most important, part of preparing your presentation.
Do not assume
It’s far too easy to assume what your audience wants to hear and even easier to completely mess up your presentation because you didn’t know your audience. The worst part is you might not even know you messed up.
But if you’ve ever noticed that your audience isn’t paying attention or you didn’t get the result you were hoping for, it’s pretty safe that you didn’t know your audience as well as you should have.
A brief story about assuming
A client of mine was very proud of an important presentation he gave to an international audience. There are about 300 high-ranking people from his industry in attendance. I was eager to learn and help him replicate his success so I asked him about the presentation.
As he explained, I got this uneasy feeling in my stomach because I knew I would have to tell him some bad news. Everything he told me about his presentation content were things that his audience already knew. Not only did they know it, but they were likely experts on the subject.
So what my client did was essentially bore his audience to death. At the same, he degraded his own reputation and credibility by not offering anything new and not showing off his own expertise.
Avoid the mess…and boring your audience to death
So here are eight essential questions you need to answer to help you paint a picture of your audience, and most importantly, what their possible motivations are for listening to your presentation.
1. Are they male or female?
2. How old are they?
3. What do they look like, as in their physical appearance and how they dress?
4. Where do they live?
5. What kind of job do they have?
6. What do they do for fun?
7. What is their education level?
8. What is their social status?
Now you know
You can now get a pretty good picture of who your audience is. Make sure you go through these 8 questions every time you prepare a presentation. DO NOT SKIP this step. It will be easy to want to but do so at your own risk.
Coming up
In the next two videos I’ll talk about how you can better understand your audience’s motivations so that your presentation content matches up with what your audience wants to hear.
Thanks and talk to you next time.
Carl
Transcript:
In this video, you’re going to learn the first of three things that you must know about your presentation audience so you don’t completely mess up your presentation.
Ok so knowing your audience is one of the most important, if not the most important, part of preparing your presentation.
It’s far too easy to assume what your audience wants to hear and even easier to completely mess up your presentation because you didn’t know your audience.
The worst part is you might not even know you messed up.
But if you’ve ever noticed that your audience isn’t paying attention or you didn’t get the result you were hoping for, it’s pretty safe to say you didn’t know your audience as well as you should have.
So here are eight essential questions you need to answer to help you paint a picture of your audience, and most importantly, what their possible motivations are for listening to your presentation.
1. Are they male or female?
2. How old are they?
3. What do they look like, as in their physical appearance and how they dress?
4. Where do they live?
5. What kind of job do they have?
6. What do they do for fun?
7. What is their education level?
And finally 8, what is their social status?
And there you go. You can now get a pretty good picture of who your audience is.
In the next two videos I’ll talk about how you can better understand your audience’s motivations so that your presentation content matches up with what your audience wants to hear.
So be sure to subscribe to my YouTube Channel and subscribe to my newsletter at CarlKwan.com so you don’t miss a thing.
Thanks for watching and talk to you next time.
Bye-bye.
