Now you might be asked by your boss, your

manager, or your team to deliver a talk about something.

It all happens to, to us every once in a while.

Now maybe it's a progress report of some kind, or you're outlining a

project that you are working on or maybe you want to work on.

Now, regardless of how you decide to

deliver this information, you generally know three things.

You know how much time you have to prepare your talk,

whether it's tomorrow or next week, or a few months from now.

You know how long your presentation should be, whether

you've got five minutes to give this talk, 20.

You know, you're gonna be key noting or an hour.

And the third thing is you should have a pretty good

idea of who your audience will be, and its this third

point that is key.

Understanding who your audience is needs to be a huge part of your preparation.

If you can tailor your presentation to fit the experience level and

the interest of your audience, they're going to retain so much more.

They're gonna get so much value out of it.

And in the end, they'll be more apt

to take action, whatever action you present there.

Now as I was preparing this presentation, I wanted to reach out to

some people that have given lots of talks on their on their own.

Whether it's you know, with their different teams or on stage.

So I reached out to some friend of mine on Twitter to get their advice.

One of the first people I heard back from is Aleyda Solis.

Aleyda is Head of Digital Strategy at WooRank, and the one tip that

she wanted to share with people giving presentations is to know your audience,

and shape your presentation accordingly to make it useful and actionable to them.

Also, leverage storytelling.

Now basically, this echoes that first point that I made.

If your presentation isn't relevant to the audience, it's not going to be effective.

Now, let's take a, a real

business scenario where preparation like this becomes a real factor.

So, say you're a freelancer and a friend of yours

tells you about a local business that needs a new site.

I mean their, you, you look at their site and it's woefully out of date.

And you know that you can do so much better, and I think this

is kind of a classic example for a lot of devs and developers out there.

All right, so you decide to approach them. Right.

So I'm gonna pick on

a local business here which I actually love, no disrespect to the

Beefy King, but here in Orlando the Beefy King website is not responsive.

The images and the usability could be improved, maybe.

You know, they can add some nice features like an online ordering app.

That might be something that they could use

that I know maybe some other restaurants have.

Now, the mistake that some freelancers

make, if they wanna approach a business like

this, is to fire off a general boiler plate.

Sort of pitch.

Where they talk about who they are, maybe a couple of the skills they have.

And then they, you know, they leave it with,

you know, contact for, contact us for a quote.

This isn't all that compelling.

Alright, you're, what you're really doing is taking this

sort of lean back approach and you're relying on

the potential client to put all the pieces together.

To come to the same conclusion that you did.

Right?

That they need a new site, and that you're well suited to it.

You know, don't make them do all the work here, all right.

If you know your audience and of course you know, here they are on their website.

Why settle for a generic pitch when you can tailor something specifically

for them. Okay.

Research your audience and identify their needs.

These are two key points that I wanna

make about preparation of any presentation or pitch.

Research the potential client.

Check out their website.

You know, take a look at everything on there.

And then take a look at their industry.

Look at their competitors.

See what their competitors have on their websites.

What features they have, what content. Stuff like that, right?

And then speak to some of the needs that

you identify within the pitch that you send them.

So, You know, you may do your research and you may discover that

the customer at the Beefy King don't

necessarily care about an online ordering app.

You know, it's an idea you had.

It was worth pursuing, but you know, unless it's

safe for catering and large parties or

events, these guy don't specifically need it.

But what they really want when they hit the

site, I'm talking about potential customers here for them, is

you know, if they are on a mobile device

say, is they want quick access to location information, right?

So, maybe putting the map in the location on the

home page is better than burying it within the site.

This could be a conclusion that you

come to because you understand the potential client.

And by understanding the audience, you know, and

the, their needs, you can better plan your approach.

The same type of approach could be used during a job search.

You know, you don't wanna send a generic cover letter

to everyone, to every company, about every opening that's out there.

You should be customizing

it based on the job description. Their company, website, and so on.

You know, another example, here on Authentic Jobs.

They have a job opening from Charity Water.

And there's a lot of detail in

it, especially this section here, the must-haves.

Right, you can see point by point what

kind of skills they're looking for in an applicant.

They, they just, they're spelled out for you right here.

These are their needs. And this is fantastic.

If only you knew.

If only all potential clients put out their, what their

must-haves are, what their needs were, this would be amazing, right?

So when you pitch them you know, if you're going for this job, for

example, on your qualifications, you don't ignore

this stuff, especially when it's labeled must-haves, right?

So refer to this or address it in some way so

that they realize that you understand their needs.

So, are client pitches and job applications

over email necessarily presentations in the classic sense?

Not really, but the principles are very much the same.

Knowing you audience, who they are, what they're interested

in, is extremely important in this process of preparing something.

Otherwise the presentation is not going to resonate.

It won't be as effective.

And you won't get as many people to do what you want them to do.