How to Relate to Your Audience
You are giving a speech to a group who has come along to listen to
you. How can you make your speech more relevant to them? How can you
make an impact on their lives by ensuring you speak to them on a
level that is pertinent to their wants and needs? It’s not as
difficult as it sounds, you just need to do a bit of research before
hand and target your speech accordingly. Also you need to be
prepared to interact with your audience and build a rapport with
them.
1. Find out what you can about the audience before your
presentation. Asking the organizers to give you some demographics of
the people attending can do this. For example, if it is a business
presentation some of the things you may want to know include: type
of business, how many people are attending, organizations they come
from, male to female ratio, how long have they been in the business,
and so on. If you are presenting a speech as an after-dinner speaker
you will want to know what the dinner is in aid of. If it is a
sports dinner you will need to focus your presentation on your
sporting life. If you find out about your audience before your write
your speech you can target your talk appropriately and let the
audience know what benefits they will get from listening to you.
2. If you are speaking as an expert in a particular field, your
audience will be there because they have an interest in that field.
You can relate to your audience in this speaking situation by
offering them a solution to problems they may be facing. You may
even ask the organizers what the participants hope to gain from your
presentation. With this type of specifics you can really present
relevant information to your audience.
3. Relate your speech with examples and stories that are relevant to
the audience. If you are speaking at a quilting conference, relate
stories of your quilting successes (and failures) so you will appear
more in touch with your audience.
4. Use conversational style speech for all presentations. To
effectively relate to your audience, you must not put yourself
‘above’ them.
5. Interact with your audience, whether it is during or after your
presentation. Workshops and seminar presentations can be sprinkled
with audience participant activities. Speeches where you are calling
your audience to action can use activities, even if it is only vocal
responses to passion-driven questions.
If your audience feels a part of what you are doing, they are more
likely to relate to you and take home your message.