What Communication Strategy Will You Use In Your Next Speech?

To be effective, your next speech needs a communication strategy
To be effective, your next speech needs a communication strategy

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So why are you planning on going to the effort of delivering your next speech? I mean it sure seems like a lot of effort to create the speech, practice it, and then go through the stress of actually giving it. If you want to create a message that is going to impact your audience – perhaps change them in some way, then you’re going to need to create a communication strategy that you can use when you’re building your next speech. Got one of those?

Who Is Your Target Audience?

As you start to create your next speech, the very first question that you’ll need to find the answer to is just exactly who will you be talking to? These are going to be the people that you’ll want to “buy” your message. You are going to need to understand who they are so that you can tailor your message to meet their unique needs.

What Is Your Core Message?

Too many messages can leave an audience dazed and confused. That’s why it’s your job as a speaker to slim down your speech so that you have one core message. This core message has to be what is the most important to your audience. As you identify your core message, you are going to have to take the time to clearly explain to your audience what makes your message different from all of the other messages that they’ve heard. Why should they care about what you are telling them?

What Style And Tone Will You Use?

In order for your message to really hit home with your audience, you are going to have to deliver it using a style and a tone that is going to work with your audience. This goes back to making sure that you fully understand your audience. Once you know this, you’ll understand if a serious or a joking or perhaps even a snide tone will be what is required to get your audience to remember what you tell them.

What Is The Response That You Want From Your Audience?

The last point in creating your speech’s communication strategy is to determine what response you want to get from your audience. Often called the “call to action” this has to do with what you want your audience to do once you are done speaking. You need to think about the results that you want from your audience and then you need to design your speech to make this happen.

What All Of This Means For You

As speakers, our goal every time that we give a speech is to have an impact on our audience – we want to change lives. This is what the importance of public speaking is all about. In order for this to happen, we need to be able to create speeches that have a built-in communication strategy.

A communication strategy has four parts to it. First, we need to determine who our target audience is going to be. Next, we need to decide on a single core message that our speech is going to focus on. We then pick the style and tone that the speech will be delivered in and finally we pick the response that we want the speech to generate in our audience.

Having a communication strategy actually helps us to create better speeches. Instead of a rambling speech that may have no clear purpose, by using a communication strategy we can make sure that we know what we want to accomplish with our speech. Take the time to incorporate a communication strategy into your next speech and you’ll discover the true benefits of public speaking.

– Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World Public Speaking Skills™

Question For You: Do you think that there would ever be a time that a speech could have more than one core message?

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Note: What we talked about are advanced speaking skills. If you are just starting out I highly recommend joining Toastmasters in order to get the benefits of public speaking. Look for a Toastmasters club to join in your home town by visiting the web site www.Toastmasters.org. Toastmasters is dedicated to helping their members to understand the importance of public speaking by developing listening skills and getting presentation tips. Toastmasters is how I got started speaking and it can help you also!

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

Argh! There never seems to be enough time to pull that next presentation together. Even though we know about the importance of public speaking somehow we always seem to find ourselves rushing around way too late in the process throwing our PowerPoint or Keynote decks together. We all know that images are important and so it’s all too easy to have Mr. Google go out and find that one perfect image or quote that so nicely sums up what you are trying to say. However, by doing this have you just broken the law?