Start Your Webinar Planning From Your Audience's Point of View by Gihan Perera

Some presentation skills coaches say that you should speak about something you're passionate about. As important as it is to speak from your own passion, it's far more important to speak about something that matches the audience's passion.

Before you even think about designing your webinar, discover your audience's passion:

What makes them tick?
What keeps them awake at night?
What are their wildest dreams?
What are their biggest fears?

Then use that as the basis for your presentation.

This doesn't mean you bend like a reed in the wind to cater to every audience's whim. You might be presenting the same core message each time, but you tailor it to ensure you engage each audience.

For example, if you're passionate about saving the rain forests, how would you present that message to a group of fellow environmentalists? What about to a mining consortium? What about to a group of politicians? How about presenting it to a class of high school students? Primary school students? Your fellow workers? You can't just present the same message to everybody - no matter how passionate you are about it!

One of the advantages of webinars is that you can deliver them at low cost and to small audiences. So it is easy to deliver the same webinar over and over again, with minor changes for each audience.

If you know their questions, issues, challenges, problems and concerns before you start, you've got a much better chance of addressing them in your webinar. This doesn't mean you'll tell them what they want to hear. Rather, it means you know their viewpoint before you start.

Apart from simply being more engaging (which is important in itself!), understanding your audience has other benefits:

You can structure your presentation to address their most important concerns;
You can be ready for a hostile audience, and for presenting sensitive or controversial material;
You know their main questions ahead of time, so you won't be caught by surprise with difficult questions;
If you're not planning to address some of their concerns, you can set the agenda so they know the scope of your presentation;
They know you've taken the time to understand them (As the saying goes, "They don't care how much you know until they know how much you care");
Because they have participated in the preparation, they feel a stronger commitment to the presentation;
Even if they haven't met you, they "know" you before you begin your presentation.

If you really put this into practice and find out what makes your audience tick, it gives you a huge advantage over most webinar presenters.


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