How to Make Your Technical Presentation Relevant to Your Audience | Elevated You

Read Time: 2 mins

Most people don't take the time to understand who their audience will be when they’re delivering a presentation.  Most presenters think about what's important to them, what they want to say and then throw some slides together that supports it.

That's a very self-centric approach and has limited success.  It leads to irrelevant content, disengaged audiences and makes you forgettable.

You need to flip to an audience centric approach where you prioritise how you can give value to the audience.  A great way to think about this is the with the "What, Why, How Equalizer".

Think about a graphic equaliser.  Maybe you had one on an old school hifi, or an app on your phone to make your headphones sounds better.

You can turn up the bass, reduce the middle, boost the treble and make the music sound so much better.

The "What, Why, How Equalizer" is exactly the same idea, but with the amount of what, the amount of  why and the amount of how in a presentation.  Different persona's value different amounts of what, why and how.

In episode #001 of the Elevated You Podcast former Hyundai UK CEO Tony Whitehorn shared that senior leaders often aren't interested in the how.  So when you're talking to them about Tech, they care about what you're doing, and they care about why you're doing it.  But they don't care about the detail of how you're going to do it.  That's often where people in the tech world go wrong.

So the graphic equaliser for a senior business leader would look like this:

But on the flip side, if you're delivering to a load of hardcore tech folks they really care about the How.  Not enough How leads to the dreaded "Marketecture" insult.  All gloss and no substance on how the solution really works.  The folks that need to integrate and implement the tech need the detail - they need the how. 

A graphic equaliser like this would be more suitable:

So when you're designing presentation content, use this visual tool.  Think who will be in the audience and design the perfect graphic equaliser to make your content relevant, engaging and memorable.

Hope this helps

BenP