Understand Your Audience

Understand your audience, know your audience. This is an incredibly important aspect of being a speaker, no matter what your area of speaking is. And I have been shocked at the number of times that I've seen professional, professional speakers walk in front of an audience, not understand that audience, and immediately break rapport. And that's bad. So let's talk about some things that you can do to make it better. Look, if it's your own audience, if it's for a program you organized, you probably have a pretty good sense of who's there, so we don't need to worry about that. But if it's somebody else's audience, if you've been brought in as a speaker, then what I suggest you do is first of all speak to the producer or the promoter. Have, hey, who's here? What do you think their primary questions are? What is their level of education in this particular area? The more you know about the audience, the easier it's going to be for you to craft your start, to get their engagement and to craft your overall presentation. Now, the other thing you can do because many conferences have social media channels, is you can actually jump onto their Facebook group or their social media channel and actually engage with the audience. I do it frequently. Hey guys, I'm going to be speaking tomorrow at 3 o'. Clock. I. Let me know if you have any questions about whatever the topic is. This serves two really great functions. One, I find out what they're curious about and I can craft my talk for them. But the other important function is it allows me to plug my 3 o' clock talk in a really innocent way. Hey, I'm going to be there at 3 o'. Clock. So I really want you to think about something. Imagine somebody answers my question on there. They tell me their question right there in the Facebook group. What are the odds that they show up for my talk? A lot higher. Right. Because they've engaged. And by the way, what about the other people that read that question and thought that's going to be really interesting, I'm going to be there. The more engagement I can create, the more interest I'm going to have in my talk and maybe the more people are in the room. But now there's another example I want to give you or another methodology. And the way I think of every audience is that that audience is moving at a certain, say, information velocity from zero to, say, 100 miles an hour or 100 kilometers an hour. And what that means is let's imagine that we're talking about financial planning and let's say these people know nothing about financial planning. They don't know about retirement savings plans, they don't know about stocks and bonds, they don't know about derivatives. They don't know these things. So maybe they're moving along at about 10 miles per hour. So that means I need to start my talk at 10 miles per hour. If I'm good, I can speed that up. I can teach them some things. Once they have those understanding, I can teach them the next thing. But what do you think would happen if I walked in and started doing an 80 mile an hour talk for a 10 mile an hour audience? Not good. But equally the opposite is just as bad. Recently I did an event with one of the top speakers in the world and we were speaking in a very international location, which I will not name at this particular moment. But he misjudged his audience. He thought they were 15 mile an hour audience and they were frankly 60 or 70 miles an hour with his content. They'd all bought his books, they knew his material. He walked on and gave a 15 mile an hour talk and broke rapport and broke his reputation in that particular audience. So one of the things you want to do is really learn your audience, know who they are and know who they are relative to your content, meet them where they are, and then pace and lead them for more.