9 Tips To Become An Effective Speaker At Events And Conferences

You may be a successful leader or a thorough professional, but conquering the art of public speaking at a conference is a whole different ball game. With adequate preparation, you can turn your fear of public speaking into an excellent opportunity to showcase your subject knowledge, experiences, and brand journey. Another part of understanding the event audience is understanding what they want to hear about. Understanding the attendee demographic breakdown will help you prepare your talk for the event by understanding what the audience is really looking for.

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Here are some of my thoughts on preparing to speak at conferences. Colleagues who’ve noticed that I occasionally abandon my day-job duties and gallivant around at conferences sometimes ask me for conference tips. How can they too ditch the day job for trains, planes, and an adoring audience? I understand why they’re asking – speaking at conferences is fun, the better conferences serve dessert four times a day, and hotel breakfast buffets almost always include bacon.

John also has extensive copywriting experience across diverse industries, including broadcast television, retail advertising, associations, higher education, and corporate PR. Being a conference speaker can open amazing doors both personally and professionally and we can’t wait to see your success. You won’t be doing yourself or your audience any favours by changing the way that you conduct your talks. In fact, if https://www.clippings.me/users/axtora-corp you come across as fake it will have the opposite effect.

Conference organizers need to think about the big picture and what makes most sense in the context of their agenda and target audience. It just means they don’t think you’d be a good speaker at this particular event to this particular audience. I created small marketing pages for the talks I’ve given in 2024. These include all resources and the abstracts I submitted to the conference organizers.

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If, on the other hand, you work for an SME, you will have to prove your value, she suggested. Either you will need to show a large-company background and can explain the relevance of your content to a wider audience, or you need to work out your key selling points. Speaking can raise the profile of your company at the event, so try to sell the idea internally that you could be a good person to go and represent your team and the firm, she suggested. SPEAK Conference is a gathering for preachers to dive into the Word and learn practical tips from some of the most gifted communicators of our generation. Our goal is to equip leaders to communicate the gospel clearly and compellingly, and cultivate the proper heart posture for preaching. At the end of your talk, provide an easy to remember link to your slides, code, and contact info, and encourage the audience to reach out.

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Play to your own strengths and stick to what you are good at. This is the best way to keep your audience as engaged as possible throughout your talk. And it will give you the best chance of getting your message across. The important thing to note is that you should always focus on your own presentation – there is a good reason you are here, and all you need to do is ensure that your talk is as good as it can be. Different presenter will have their own style or topics, but audiences enjoy variation. Do not, under any circumstances, consider radically altering your talk because of another talk that you have seen that day.

• Book a FREE call with our team to get started — you’ll learn why the vast majority of our students start booking paid speaking gigs even before they finish our program.
• Stand tall, maintain eye contact, and use natural gestures to convey confidence and authenticity.
• When not sharing his love of Git, C#, and unit testing, he can be found spending his “study time” studying the sounds of guitar and music theory.
• We also took pains to make the events as easy as possible to attend, for example, by mailing guests meal kits or drink kits with everything they needed to participate.

Most conference agendas are developed six months before the conference dates, and some are developed over eight to ten months. These two platforms are great for managing your talk submissions. They make it easy to apply to multiple conferences and allow you to discover new events. You can keep track of what talks you submitted where and which ones get accepted. I check them regularly for new opportunities, and it’s always exciting to see what’s out there. If you do decide that you want to actively seek out folk to network with at conferences, more power to you.

They need speakers to give talks at their never-ending trainings, seminars, industry events and conferences, and company retreats. Not only that, but the revenue potential is very good in this industry. These companies usually have sizeable speaker budgets set aside every year, so the pay could be a big motivation to speak at a conference in this industry. If you can establish yourself as a noted speaker you could have good, consistent revenue coming your way, not to mention a consistent client base. Once you have built a network of speakers, word of mouth is great for discovering good events. In the interim, follow interesting people on social media, and make a note of where they’re speaking.

Look at the event website and marketing materials to get a sense of attendees’ demographics, job roles, and the types of companies represented. This insight will help you choose a topic audience members truly want to hear about. This week I gave my first keynote presentation at Fluent in San Francisco, in front of a crowd of nearly 1000 people — a feat I would have thought unimaginable ten years ago. I’m an introvert, and talking to huge groups of people is not my specialty.

Event organizers may come back to you and say they can’t/don’t pay speakers. This is a whole other conversation we plan on covering because it’s becoming a major issue. However, knowing your value and expectations will set the table for a better conversation up front. Also include evidence of your impressive onstage presence. Coverage of your talk by bloggers in the audience also helps the organizers sense the vibe in the room.

I am also an introvert and have found ways to engage with complete strangers at a conference (more on this later!). Regardless of where your friend is on the introvert-extrovert spectrum, some company at the event will help. Involve yourself in conversations that are happening online via Twitter and Facebook, for example. Reveal your opinions on things related to the business world. The people working at the sponsor booths will approach you if you so much as look at one of their free t-shirts for more than 0.76 seconds.

Another challenge was creating an event strategy against a backdrop of so much uncertainty. I have seen industry colleagues invest resources in planning in-person events, only to have to rejigger in the final hour. I made the decision from the onset of the year to plan for virtual events, given our small team and resources. This allowed us to create more effective and engaging virtual events from the start and maximize our budget. You can follow up and maintain long-standing connections through social media such as LinkedIn, Twitter, etc.