How To Reach An Audience

To Reach an audience, you have to know how to choose the right target audience, the right medium, and the right message. You cant communicate with everyone in the world. Great communicators know how to direct their messages toward an audience they can realistically expect to reach, whether that audience is a roomful of people or a single employee.

Here are five questions that will help you find the right audience:

1. What do you want to do? Be specific about what you want to accomplish. If you have a fuzzy message or unclear goals, you wont have a logical audience to target.

2. Who can help you get it done? Communicate with the audience that can help you do what you want to do. If you need your television fixed, dont bother telling the entire neighborhood. The only audience you should be communicating with is the person who sold you the television.

3. Who would want to help you do it? People do things for their reasons, not yours. Look for an audience that has a strong reason to help you.

4. Why would an audience listen to you? The information age constantly bombards people with messages. Why should they listen to yours? Reasons include your position of authority, your knowledge of the topic, or your eloquence.

5. How accessible is this audience? If you run a convenience store, an ad in a large metropolitan daily newspaper is not going to do you much good: Most of the audience is out of your reach. However, if the paper has the regional edition for your area, an advertisement in that edition would reach an accessible audience.

After youve narrowed down your choice of audience through these five questions. Now you have to evaluate your choices to find the ideal audience. Your ideal audience should have the power or authority to do what you want it to do. For example, if you want a raise, you need to talk to the person who has the authority to give it to you.

You need to choose the right medium to convey your message. Each medium has its strengths and weaknesses. Use the medium whose strengths match the requirements of your message. For example, if your message relies on visual impact, dont try to convey it by radio. If your message is complex, dont try short audiovisual advertisement spots. It would be better to convey it through the print media.

Perhaps the best way to convey your particular message is through public speaking. For example, if youre a developer and you are looking for public support to build a shopping mall, a public presentation would be more effective than a newspaper advertisement with pretty pictures of the mall.

Whatever medium you decide to use, take your time in deciding how you will use it. Make your presentation attractive. For example, if youre speaking publicly, dont show up in old wrinkled clothes and uncombed hair. Dont send out a brochure with a hard-to-read type jammed tightly onto pages of cheap paper, or make a DVD with shaky images in a dull setting.

Timing and the length of your presentation are critical to your success. For example, if youre selling Christmas cards, dont send out your catalog on December 10th. If youre presentation is too long, youll lose your audience, whether your presentation is a three-hour speech or a twenty-five page brochure.

Once you have a target audience in mind and have selected the right medium, the next step is to present your message in the most appealing and effective way. The first thing you must do, is choose your subject carefully. The right subject will be one that addresses the needs and wants of the audience. If you can identify those needs and wants and convince the audience that what you propose will satisfy them, you will get the response you want.

For example, if you want to motivate your sales force, you might want to talk to them about making money and beating the competition, two very powerful motivating topics for salespeople.

The more you know about the subject, the better your presentation will be. Always stick to the subjects you know well and be prepared to back up your statements with carefully researched data.

The best way to do your research for a presentation is to cast a broad net, collecting all the statistics, examples, and other data you can get your hands on. Then narrow down the information and use the materials that will support your unique selling proposition or USP. This is the core proposal that convinces the audience to do what you want them to do.

Whether youre trying to make a sale, inspire greater productivity, or propose marriage always look for the unique selling proposition, and use the materials that back up your unique selling proposition the best.

You can have the right audience, the right medium, and compelling facts, but if your message is not organized correctly it will fall flat. Your message needs to have three main parts:

1. An introduction. An introduction is the main attention getter. You will never be able to communicate if you cannot grab your audiences attention. The introduction should lead into the main body of the talk.

2. The main body. The main body of communication presents the most compelling point. The most effective way to do this is to subcategorize the main body into three parts, one part presenting your compelling point, and the other two parts setting it up or explaining it.

3. The conclusion. A good conclusion reinforces what you have said. Summarize the main points briefly, distilling your message into three or four short, memorable sentences. Your conclusion should invite the audience the act. Your message isnt complete until youve told people precisely and persuasively what you want them to do.

Finally, a conclusion should inspire your audience. It is always effective to end with a challenging question, a glowing promise, or a strong statement of your most compelling point.

The purpose of communication is to make things happen. If nothing happens as a result of your speech, letter, or presentation, then you have failed. You should judge the success of your message by looking at both the short-term and long-term results.

In a short-term success, the audience enjoys the presentation and understands the point you are making. A long-term success moves the audience to take the action you want them to take.

Technology helps us communicate messages faster and to a larger audience than every before. But technology does not create the message. Communication is still a human activity, having to do with meanings, understandings, feelings, needs, and ideas.

Copyright2006 by Joe Love and JLM & Associates, Inc. All rights reserved worldwide.

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Public Speaking: Self-Effacing Humor

Self-effacing humor, or making fun of yourself is quite a contrast. It is a very powerful form of humor that gets its strength from highlighting your weaknesses. It seems that people who have the ability to laugh at themselves in just the right amount during a public speaking engagement are perceived as secure, confident, strong, and likeable.

With this type of humor, a little goes a long way. If you overdo it during a public speaking engagement, you will look like a doomsayer who is always putting yourself down. If you can't bring yourself to use any self-effacing humor, you should learn. I must be candid here. Most people hate to deal with a stuffed shirt. Unfortunately, if you can't poke a little fun at yourself, that is the way you are perceived.

I think the reason self-effacing humor works so well is that weak people feel the need to inflate themselves and powerful people don't. If you have the confidence to tease yourself, you are indirectly sending the message to the audience that you are secure and powerful. Most audiences can see right through speakers who are trying to puff themselves up. It turns them off quickly.

The person who is not afraid to tease him or herself is the one who makes the greatest connection with the audience because everyone in the audience has embarrassed themselves or failed at something at one time or the other. If you use self-effacing humor, the audience knows that you, as the presenter, know how it feels to fail. That is a very powerful magnet.

Katharine Rolfe, President of The Lighten Up Club, takes self-effacing humor one step further. She says, 'I call it self-appreciating humor because it conveys a positive appreciation of ourselves as humans who are simply out there doing our best and bumbling along as we go.' Katharine's organization believes the key to a happy life is the ability to laugh at yourself, for then you are never without a source of amusement.

Unless you are a Don Rickles type presenter (known for his hockey puck teasing style of humor), you should never set yourself up as superior to the audience either socially, financially, or intellectually. You want the audience to accept you as one of them. Let them feel superior to you in some way. Your audience would rather hear about the time you fell on your face, rather than the time you won the race.

That is why self-effacing humor is great during speaking engagements. The audience likes the fact that you openly admit your weaknesses. They laugh, but they still respect you because you are self-confident enough to joke about yourself.

There are any number of things you can tease yourself about. Your physical appearance is good if you are especially tall, or short or fat or bald. Just make sure that the physical appearance is obvious to the audience. If you are disorganized, you could tease yourself about that. If you can't parallel park, you could tease yourself about that. Just about anything will work as long as you are the target.

What you want to avoid teasing about is any subject that has a direct tie to your credibility. For instance, if you were a nuclear control room technician, you would not want to joke about the time you pushed the wrong button. But, if you got fired from your job as a nuclear control room technician for almost pushing the wrong button, then this fact might be a good topic for humor. It could turn into a great topic if you now own a landscaping company or are in some other non-threatening position.

To use self-effacing humor, you don't necessarily have to joke about yourself. You can make fun of your family background, your profession, or anything else that directly relates to you. I tell a story in my presentations about the time my mom came from our very small hometown to visit me in the big city of Washington, D.C. The audience hears about how small Claysville is and that my mom's house is way out in the sticks. We didn't have city water, or city sewerage, or cable TV. I then go on to tell how we took a trip on the Spirit of Washington for a dinner cruise and went sightseeing all over the capital. Here's how the end of the story goes:

"When we got home that evening I was exhausted, so I told mom I was going to bed and that I would see her in the morning. She said, "OK. I'm just going to watch the news and then I'll go to bed." I got up at about 2:00 a.m. and there was mom sitting in front of the TV. Her head was nodding and drooping. I said, "Mom. What are you doing?" She said, "I'm just waiting for the news to be over." Well she would have waited a long time because she was watching . . .CNN 24 hour headline news."

In this story I was not directly teasing myself. I was teasing about my small town background and about the innocent and funny boner my mom pulled when she came to visit.

Former president Ronald Reagan was a master at using self-effacing humor. In his bid for the Presidency in 1980 his age appeared to be his biggest obstacle. He attacked the problem with self-effacing humor. He would joke about his age all the time which turned age into a non-issue. He told a group of reporters once, 'Thomas Jefferson once said, 'One should not worry about chronological age compared to the ability to perform the task.' . . . Ever since Thomas Jefferson told me that I stopped worrying about my age.'

Look for opportunities to tease yourself. This will be one of your most powerful tools to connect with the audience and a subtle way to show your strength.

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