Be Valuable

Serve your audience effectively.

No matter whether you are presenting, pitching, entertaining or educating from the stage, your true responsibility is to serve your audience. To do this, you must at least meet their lowest expectations. Unfortunately, this is often all that most speakers do, but worse is that many do not even reach this level.

I believe that it is best to exceed your audience’s expectations. In my coaching and courses, I teach a system of intertwining the audience journey and the emotional journey to do this.

However, today I am going to aim lower and explain what needs to be done to meet the audience’s expectations, so you will have no excuse. Today I will explain your audience’s minimum expectations and how you can meet them.

The Knowledge Gap

The key to meeting your audience's expectations is to identify and address the knowledge gap that your audience has in terms of your topic. The knowledge gap is a function of the disconnection between the ideal endpoint, the goal, and the current situation. Usually part of that disconnect is a lack of knowledge about something.

So the minimum you need to do to give your audience satisfaction is to identify their knowledge gap, and bridge that gap with some actionable information. That is a short concise sentence but there is a lot in there to unpack.

Of course, not everyone in the audience will have an identical knowledge gap, but surprisingly often there is a very common knowledge gap throughout the audience. -This is what you need to identify.

Identifying the Gap

Actually, you want to start by identifying several common knowledge gaps. Make a note of how commonly these things are misunderstood, or simply not known. Once you have a list of things the general public is ignorant of on your topic, you want to start narrowing the list down.

Firstly you want to see which things may be of interest specifically for this particular audience. Where their interests and the common misconceptions intersect. Once you have noted these items you also want to look at the entire list and see which is the most generally interesting, something that might be exciting, surprising, controversial or astonishing. We will refer to this as the headline gap.

Ideally, the headline gap will be something that is of specific interest to the audience. But it isn’t critical that it is specific to your audience, as long as it is interesting in and of itself, AND you do have something else to cover that is specific to this audience.

Example:

Let’s say your topic is corporate communication systems and are addressing an audience in the medical field. You know that most people consider using a new internal system of communication an added burden because they need to learn a new system and process.

However, you know the ultimate benefits of an effective system, and that is your main knowledge gap which you highlight with a story for many audiences. But this isn’t really a headline gap.

Your research shows that iatrogenic deaths in the USA may reach as many as 251,000 annually. This means that making medical errors is the third leading cause of death in the U.S.

This is a knowledge gap that will be of significant interest to this particular audience. Particularly if you have a story that can show how your internal communications system includes checks to minimise these sorts of errors.

In this example, there is a very clear link between the headline gap and your topic.

However, if your topic was different, this headline gap might still be a good one to include in your talk.

Let’s say your topic was around health and fitness to the same audience. You could still use this headline gap to grab attention, linking it somewhat to medical professionals being tired and stressed. While your more topical gaps will be around the importance of sleep, diet, exercise, or whatever your particular specialisation is.

Filling the Gap

Once you have identified two or three knowledge gaps to address in your presentation, you need to craft a way to fill them. I use the term craft advisedly because you don’t just want to give the information.

You want to tell a story with that information. You want to include context and emotion when you are addressing that knowledge gap.

This is because information by itself will not be memorable. Our minds have a subconscious process of deciding what is important to remember and what is not. A major part of this decision revolves around both context and emotion. As it is a big topic on its own, I will be looking at emotion specifically next week. So for now let’s look at context.

A Contextual Story

As alluded to in the examples given above, you need only link the knowledge gap of your topic to a benefit that can be enjoyed by this audience. But you can’t leave the audience to make this leap themselves. Sure a few of the audience will make that leap, but many more will need your help.

You also don’t want to come across as ‘preaching’ which is what tends to happen if you get excited and ‘prescribe’ your solution to their problem. In all cases, a carefully selected and constructed story will be far more effective.

To be effective it should obviously be a story. You can be explicit: “Let me tell you a story”.

It doesn’t matter if it is a true or fictional story, as long as you don’t use a fictional story and represent it as true. We are conditioned to pay attention to stories. So letting the audience know you are sharing a story will help them to tune in. -For as long as it is interesting!

The start of your story should be oblique to your point. You don’t want to get right to the point of your story or the audience will assume they know where it is going and will switch off. In fact, the more that the audience thinks “Where is this going?” the better.

Elements of your story should be relatable to your audience so that at some level they can see themselves in the story. It should contain some sort of surprise or twist that brings things into focus in a way that is unexpected. -Again storytelling is a decent-sized topic on its own, so I won’t dive into it here. But the truth is, most of us can craft a decent story given a little time.

Once you have your story or stories, it becomes a relatively simple process of creating a framework around them to link your talk or presentation together.

Conclusion

You are now armed with the knowledge and ability to identify and meet the knowledge gaps of your audience so that you can get and keep their attention, and leave them feeling satisfied in terms of learning something or having something new to think about.

In the next issue, we will be looking at the role of emotion in what we have talked about here. Then I think in the following issue we will look at crafting the call to action (CTA) which is done in two parts the logical and the emotional.

I also want to thank Sam Rathling, as this issue was inspired in part by my reading of her new book LinkedIn Outbound. I “shared a stage” with Sam at an event a few years ago. I say that in quotes because due to travel restrictions, Sam appeared virtually. Her talk was excellent, and I highly recommend her books and you should follow her on LinkedIn.

This article was originally published in the newsletter on the 25th September 2023. To get more like this, subscribe to The Compelling Communicator, a free weekly newsletter. https://compellingcommunicator.beehiiv.com/