Building your credibility by knowing your audience

by Wendi McNeill

There are many ways to build your credibility and become known as an expert, because we all know by building your credibility, in as many ways as possible, gains more attention from the media and in turn brings more speaking engagements for you. This article will teach you one way of building your credibility.

Knowing your audience: will it build your credibility? You bet it will. Knowing your audience is very important! I can’t stress this enough. What do you think happens when you really know your audience? You have: A happy audience and an engaged audience. Why?

Because you took the time to research and learn about your audience before you started to put your speech together and you have captured their attention and are giving them what they want…what they need…and you made them feel, now you are building your credibility…your audience is saying, Hey…this speaker knows his stuff...he knows us…

Your job as a presenter is to take the context you will present and put it into a form that your audience will understand and can relate to. Say you just got hired to speak and in the excitement you start building your presentation and saying I’m going to show them this…I’m going to teach them that… and forgetting to find out about your audience, who they are, where they’re coming from, what they want to learn and what they want to know. Study and research the background of your audience. Trust me you’ll be glad you did!

Vision yourself sitting in the audience you will be presenting to and ask yourself, “What do I want to get out of this?”, “What do I want to learn?”, “What’s in it for me?” Once you can perceive yourself as a participant of the audience than you can start putting the pieces together in building a top notch speech that your audience will remember and one that will have members coming to you asking you to get your schedule out because they want to book you.

I’m sharing this with you because as a mentor to many speakers I don’t like to see them not take the time to get to know their audience, because had they spent some time learning they would be in a much better position. I know many of you know that your suppose to know your audience, but what I am talking about...is really know them, not just that their a group of district managers from a communication company, you need to know more before you get up on stage because this can really make or break the outcome of your presentation, and can damage your credibility if the audience was not properly researched.

It’s as simple as this: If you don’t know your audience then you can’t make your audience “feel”, and then they aren’t going to care and if your audience doesn’t care they won’t listen to you. Communicate and relate to your audience - right away. What are you going to give them?…How will you help their business grow?...How will you help them save time?…save money?...How will you make them feel!

Performing a presentation in front of an audience is like someone coming to visit you on your website, if you can’t capture their attention right away because you weren’t catering to their specific needs, they move on and you have lost them, and is such the same with your presentation, if you don’t capture their attention right away, give them something that will benefit them right away, draw them in and make them feel, then you’ll loose them because they won’t care and then what happens? You’ve lost your audience, they become distracted and are no longer listening and then what? Zzzzzzzz…this is about the time you see your audience start falling asleep and doodling on the feedback forms…and believe me the big dogs are not beyond playing games on their cell phones!

Nobody is going to give a speaker an opportunity nor want to speak with them when they just gave a bad presentation, one they felt had nothing to do with them, one that didn’t benefit them, one where they got absolutely nothing from it, one that made half the audience go to sleep…and the other half walk out the door…definitely no opportunities there for you and if you just happen to have a decision maker for a big corporation in the audience…you just lost them as well.

Do you think you will make any sales from delivering a bad presentation, one that wasn’t well thought out, researched, or relevant to your audiences needs… no you won’t, do you think anyone will visit your website...not likely…and do you think you’re going to have your feedback forms filled out? And what do you think your chances will be of building your credibility…not very good.

Many speakers work on a referral/word of mouth basis, they rely on this to bring in more speaking engagements so they can fill their schedule, so make sure you do your homework because you don’t want your audience leaving with a bad impression of you because word of mouth can work both ways…and because your speech didn’t precisely fit the audience you’re now in the position to work even harder to build your credibility. So, please just remember to know your audience and I mean really know them!

As I previously mentioned there are many different ways to build your credibility and knowing your audience inside and out and catering to their exact needs and wants is one way to help build your credibility!