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This is the second part of the Presentation Foundation Series and will cover your presentation audience. In this second video about audience, you’ll learn one of the most important questions you need to ask about your presentation audience: Why should they care?
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 2: Why should they care?
Video length 1:40 (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 previous Presentation Foundation Series videos, 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
What You Must Know About Your Audience Video 1: 8 Essential Questions
Why you should know why they should care
I’m hoping that you’re starting to see how important it is to know your presentation audience. It all comes down to making sure you talk to your audience about what they care about. The reason is people only care about themselves. If you don’t know what your audience cares about, then there’s a great chance your presentation will not give you the results you hope for.
The most likely outcome is you’ll see your audience either dozing off, looking bored or be very happy that you’ve stopped talking.
How to ask “Why should they care?”
One important thing to remember here is to ask this question immediately after you know your presentation topic. This is easy for people who are assigned a presentation and/or topic to cover. But even if you have to come up with your own topic, asking “Why should they care?” can help you uncover your topic.
Three step process
I recommend using a mind map, white board or just a list on a piece of paper. Personally, I like mind maps on my Mac and also using Evernote.
- Do a brain dump and just write down anything you can think of that would make your audience care, that would motivate them to listen.
- Go through your list and cut it down to a top five.
- Go through the top five and cut those down to a single main reason or perhaps the top two or three reasons.
In Step 3, really try to get it to one reason because this will be something you can use throughout your presentation. Knowing this single main reason will also help you stay focused when creating your content.
However, if you really discover that there are two or three reasons, that’s okay, too. In that case, rank them in order of importance and make your content according to that ranking.
What you might find out
Two things can happen after you’ve worked on the content. First, when you’ve determined why the audience should care and you have your content, you might find that the initial answer to “Why should they care?” will be different.
This happens because once you’ve worked on the presentation, you may have a revelation about what the audience REALLY wants to hear. Don’t ignore this. It’s better to fix the content than to present the wrong thing to your audience.
The second thing that may happen is you’ll confirm that your answer to “Why should they care?” is correct. You’ll find that your presentation seems cohesive and stays focused on what your audience wants to hear. Plus, you’ll have a sense of confidence that the presentation is going to be successful.
Now you know
Remember to always ask, “Why should they care?” right from the beginning of your preparation. DO NOT SKIP this step. It is a mission critical step that will make your presentation a success or failure.
Coming up
Next time, I’m going to share with you one final way to get into your audience members’ heads and ensure that you know what content to include. If you haven’t signed up for my newsletter, then please sign up now so you don’t miss anything.
Thanks.
Carl
Transcript:
Oh yeah? What do you care!?
In this Presentation Foundation Series video, you’re going to learn one of the most important questions you need to ask your self about your presentation audience:
Why should they care?
The answer to that question will help you understand what will motivate your audience to listen to you.
So you have to ask yourself why the audience should care about your presentation right from the beginning.
It doesn’t matter what your topic is or what content you think is important to include.
The key is figuring out what the prime motivations are for your audience to listen to you, to somehow be persuaded by what you have to say.
So DO NOT skip this step and DO NOT assume you know what the answer is.
What you should do is make a list of all the possible reasons why your audience should care.
Next, go through the list and decide what the top five reasons are.
Then go through the top five and cut the list down to a single, main reason or maybe even the top two to three reasons.
At that point, you’ll have a clear idea as to what will motivate your audience to listen to you, and most importantly, care about what you have to say.
There you go. You now know one of the most important questions you need to ask about your presentation audience: Why should they care?
If you have any questions or comments about this, please leave them in the comments section below. And remember to subscribe to my YouTube Channel and sign up for my newsletter at CarlKwan.com so you don’t miss a thing.Thanks for watching and talk to you next time.
Bye-bye.
