Speed Up Your Events with AI Presentation Design

Is there anything untouched by AI these days?

AI presentation design is quickly becoming a go-to tool for businesses that care about enticing, exciting and expanding their audiences with content that connects & converts. 

AI won’t totally replace a talented designer crafting your slides (yet), but it will give you a head start or speed up the process of outlining, finding images, and fleshing out details. 

With AI tools now available in PowerPoint, it's easier than ever to create stunning visuals that capture the attention of your guests. 

Read on to learn how you can use this cutting edge technology to take your events from good to great with these tips on creating AI-generated content.

What is AI Presentation Design?

Using AI to design your presentations is all new territory, but it can help you go from good to great by releasing some of the pressure you might feel to redesign slides while thinking about the content that goes on them.

No more crunched-over-your-laptop-in-an-airport shifting objects around while enroute to your event destination.

AI algorithms create content from user-provided inputs, such as text or images, with the aim of making presentation design simpler yet still quality enough based on design templates that are easy to consume and improve comprehensive and retention.

Right now AI-generated material can work for a lot of projects, ranging from slideshows to immersive presentations with videos, animations, and 3D visuals. 

“AI presentation design” refers specifically to the use of automated processes and algorithms in order to create visuals for a presentation that have been specifically designed by using data about the target audience's preferences and interests. This includes taking into account elements such as their age range, gender, language preferences etc., which helps create visuals that are more likely to engage them.

The automated nature of AI Presentation Design offers a multitude of advantages, such as:

• increased accuracy in terms of designing visuals according to user comprehension & retention

• faster turnaround times due to automation (plug in a document and get a V1 presentation in minutes)

• improved scalability through cloud computing capabilities (edit with your team) 

• enhanced personalization potential with customization options available for each slide or page within a presentation deck (smart templates)

Furthermore, you can save enormous time, energy and resources while still creating dynamic visualizations created using natural language processing (NLP) that are sure to engage your audience. In other words, knowing about this cutting-edge technology is hugely valuable for event producers looking to make their clients’ lives easier. 

“Some people call this artificial intelligence, but the reality is this technology will enhance us. So instead of artificial intelligence, I think we’ll augment our intelligence.”

—Ginni Rometty

How to Use AI for presentations?

AI-generated presentations can help entice, excite and expand your audience when aligned overall with your premium event brand.

Like all things AI, however, you will make it better the more “human” you make it. The more stories you share. The more personal images you have. These things create connection with the audience.

Creating an AI-generated presentation requires several steps and best practices in order to ensure the content is engaging and effective.

Here’s how you can use AI for presentations:

1. Start by gathering data about your topic. Create an outline of the main points and arguments. Stay out of the presentation software as long as possible so you give yourself a chance to refine your ideas.

2. Decide on your software (besides PowerPoint, beautiful.ai, Adobe Spark & pitch are also solid options), begin exploring available options such as PowerPoint's Designer feature or other top-tier solutions like Adobe Spark. 

3. Input your outline into the software to create a V1 deck. Your outline will allow the software to generate visuals based on the data that are relevant and tailored specifically to your audience from your outline.

4. Once you have customized the visuals to make sure they’re capturing the meaning behind your message, you can further refine them to make sure the overall look aligns with your overall event brand. Depending on the software, you can also apply a template at this phase and speed up the process again.

Tips for Making the Most Out of AI-Generated Content:

When using AI generated content in presentations, you can’t just rely on what’s automatically created. AI is often wrong or just makes stuff up because it knows it sounds good if it were true (scary, right?!)

But another area where it matters is including elements specific to your story or point of view to give each slide its own personality, while still remaining consistent with the overall theme of the presentation. 

Adding these stories or anecdotes related directly back to topics discussed within slides helps keep audiences engaged rather than simply having them passively observe what’s being presented without taking anything away from it afterwards. 

And of course, like we advise all of our clients, have a back up plan if the tech fails! Don’t rely on slides to do the communicating for you. We learned this the hard way once when doing a client event where we lost the teleprompter feed, and the CEO needed their script to finish. 

Popular Tools for Creating AI-Generated Content

PowerPoint’s New Feature – Copilot:

Microsoft PowerPoint recently leaked “Copilot” that will use AI to create presentations (here).

This feature helps users automatically generate slides with pre-populated content and design elements. 

With the help of AI, it can detect the main topic of your presentation and suggest relevant images and graphics that you can use in your slides. It also suggests layout options for each slide so you don’t have to worry about manually arranging elements on each page. The Designer tool is an easy way to quickly create professional-looking presentations without having any prior design experience or knowledge.

You can also start your presentation from a Word document, and the AI will automatically create presentation slides based on the content of the Word document. 

PowerPoint Copilot pic.twitter.com/oWpYwl3beG

— WalkingCat (@_h0x0d_) March 16, 2023

Gone are the days when you developed content outlines, scripts, presentations, and then speaker’s notes in four different or four simultaneous processes that frustrate your support team and executives alike. 

Other Leading Tools for Creating AI-Generated Content: There are many other tools available for creating AI-generated content such as Adobe Spark, Canva, Slidebean, Venngage, Piktochart and more. These tools allow users to easily customize their own templates using drag & drop features while still getting the benefit of automated designs created by artificial intelligence algorithms. Additionally, these platforms offer advanced features like data visualization capabilities which make it easier (and way faster) to present complex information in an organized manner through charts and graphs.

Creating AI-generated content is a great way to speed up your presentation design process. Don’t be afraid to experiment and make new discoveries along the way, it just might even help your creative process to uncover new opportunities.

Nail the basics first, detail the details later.

-Chris Anderson

Conclusion

Using AI to create better presentations is just one way to entice, excite and expand your audience. AI-generated content can help you craft engaging and successful presentations that will blow your audience’s minds.

When done correctly, utilizing artificial intelligence in your presentations can enhance the overall experience for attendees by providing them with interesting & attractive visuals as well as saving you time with looking up the latest information regarding your topics.

Additionally, leveraging this technology allows clients to save time on tedious tasks such as manually designing slides while also enabling them to focus more on other aspects such as developing relationships with attendees or sponsors.

Key Takeaway: Utilizing artificial intelligence in event production can be a great way to engage and expand your audience, while also saving time on tedious tasks. By utilizing the correct resources and familiarizing oneself with AI presentation design principles, it is possible to make captivating presentations that will leave a lasting effect on viewers.

FAQs in Relation to AI Presentation Design

• Is there an AI that makes presentations?

  No, there is not an AI that makes presentations. Software programs exist to aid in automating the construction of presentations, furnishing users with templates and resources for customizing slides with text, visuals, videos, animations and more. These tools can be used as a starting point or guide when crafting a professional-looking presentation but they do not provide any intelligence in terms of understanding what content should be included in order to create an effective message.

• Can AI make a PowerPoint presentation?

  No, AI cannot make a PowerPoint presentation. AI cannot produce a PowerPoint presentation as it lacks the capacity to generate aesthetically pleasing visuals and compelling narratives that require human expertise. To produce a visually appealing and well-structured presentation with captivating content requires human expertise, knowledge of audience needs, and experience in crafting compelling narratives.

• How do you make a presentation beautiful with AI?

  Creating a beautiful presentation with AI requires an understanding of the fundamentals of design, including composition, color theory, typography and image optimization. Start by choosing colors that are aesthetically pleasing and complementary to each other. Incorporate text with bold fonts for emphasis while using subtle textures or patterns as background elements. Optimize images to ensure they display properly on all devices while keeping them light enough not to slow down loading times. Finally, create a consistent look across all slides with layouts that make it easy for viewers to follow along without becoming overwhelmed or distracted. Luckily, most software that using AI for design incorporates all of this knowledge and theory of design already to create your slides.

Conclusion

AI presentation design is a powerful tool for event producers, meeting planners and their clients to create engaging content that will entice their audience.

With the right tools, you can easily craft presentations with dynamic visuals and interactive elements using AI-generated content. AI presentation design can be just as effective as human-designed presentations, especially if they’re both driven by story and perspective.

Now that you’ve sped up your presentation process, are you ready to speed up your event design process?! Let us help you create a memorable and engaging event brand and generate all of the signage, collateral and products you need in one go.

We hate wasting time and back-and-forth just as much as you do. Schedule a call, and let’s chat!

How to Create a Memorable Event Brand: Our 4-Step Signature Process

To ensure your event stands out from the competition, you need an attention-grabbing brand that will entice, excite and expand your niche audience. 

With our signature framework, we'll help you build a unique and unforgettable brand for your next event.

Event brands unify the client experience

Branding is an essential ingredient to any successful event.

It connects your audience with your message and gets them to take action—before, during and after the event.

A well-crafted brand helps you stand out from competitors, attract more attendees, and build loyalty among existing customers.

For events, branding takes many forms - from producing attention-grabbing logos and signs to constructing remarkable encounters for attendees.

For successful event branding, you have to make sure your messaging resonates with your desired outcomes for the event by considering who your target audience is and what they want. This is something we see many businesses and organizations gloss over to their detriment!

There’s a MINIMUM base of research you need to do to figure out what makes your ideal customer tick—their values, interests, motivations, etc.

Then, and only then, can you start developing your event brand strategy based on those insights.

When we do this, we consider how best to communicate these discovered details through your visuals (logos/graphics), content programming, and other marketing materials.

Additionally, you need to determine which channels are best suited for reaching these people (social media? email campaigns?). All of these elements work together as part of a larger whole: Your unique identity as an organization or business.

By taking time upfront to create an effective brand strategy tailored specifically for your event, you’ll be able to ensure maximum impact when at showtime. With careful planning and execution of all facets of branding—visuals, copywriting/content creation & distribution strategies—you can entice new audiences while continuing to excite existing ones at every turn. And by doing so you open up possibilities beyond just increasing attendance; strong brands have been known not only increase ROI but even command value as part of larger businesses or portfolios over time.

Key Takeaway: Creating a memorable event brand requires thoughtful research into the needs and interests of your target audience, as well as crafting an effective strategy for communicating this information through visuals, content and other marketing materials. With careful planning and execution you can 'knock it out of the park' by enticing new audiences while continuing to excite existing ones - resulting in increased ROI over time.

Problems

Without a memorable event brand, you’re missing out on one of the most powerful tools to reach and engage your audience. Crafting a unique, unforgettable experience is essential for any event; something that will linger in the minds of those who attended even after it has ended. Unfortunately, many events fall short in this area due to limited resources or lack of knowledge.

Creating a successful event brand takes time and effort but can have huge rewards if done right. Before designing your branding elements, we ascertain who your target audience is and what they want from the event. Without knowing these things, it’s impossible to create something that resonates with them or creates a lasting impression.

With the wide range of media outlets for event promotion - from print to digital - comes a need for more complex designs or brand applications, often resulting in rushed or inconsistent execution. This means more work for those tasked with creating the branding elements, often leading to rushed jobs, higher design bills, or inconsistent designs across multiple platforms.

Finally, there’s also the challenge of making sure all branding pieces fit together cohesively while still being engaging enough for audiences to take notice. Crafting eye-catching visuals isn't easy; without professional help it can be difficult to achieve results which truly stand out and achieve your objective.

What you want instead

A premium event branding experience that will entice, excite and expand your audience. You want an event brand that speaks to the heart of your target market – one that resonates with them on an emotional level and helps to establish trust.

Create something that stands out from the rest, something people can recall and be impacted by a design that's distinct enough to make it easy for potential patrons to distinguish your event. Your ideal branding should be visually appealing, yet simple enough for everyone to understand what’s going on at a glance.

Your goal is also to create an atmosphere of excitement before, during and after the event so people can’t wait to come back next year or attend another one of your events in the future. This starts with making sure all aspects of your brand are cohesive: from logos & colors; fonts & images; messaging & taglines; down even to small details like tent cards & signage.

You need creative ideas that capture attention but still stay true to who you are as a company or organization and still pass your existing brand guidelines - no matter how much time passes between events or how often they change location or theme. It’s important not only for attendees but also sponsorships/partnerships because having consistency throughout builds credibility with both groups over time.

Finally, expanding upon existing relationships with past guests while engaging new ones requires thoughtful strategies like targeted email campaigns tailored specifically towards different audiences based on their interests or needs. Social media marketing tactics such as influencer partnerships can also help reach more people outside of traditional methods while providing additional content opportunities through videos, photos etc

Overall, investing in quality branding experiences pays off in dividends by helping to build strong customer loyalty which leads directly into increased sales and profits over time, not to mention higher team morale with happier attendees and more referrals.

Constructing a brand identity that will make an enduring effect on your viewers is essential, and our approach is critical to achieving this. We'll discuss how you can use branding strategies to make sure your event stands out from the rest and captures attention.

Key Takeaway: Forming a successful event brand necessitates establishing an emotional bond with the intended audience that is both attractive and unforgettable. It requires thoughtful strategies such as targeted email campaigns and influencer partnerships for maximum reach, setting your brand apart from competitors in order to build customer loyalty over time.

Our take

Our take on event branding is that it’s all about creating an experience for your audience. It’s not just about having a logo or tagline, but rather a comprehensive approach to engaging and inspiring attendees. We believe in taking the time to understand our clients’ target audiences, their motivations and needs, so we can create an event identity that resonates with them beyond the scope of the event.

We strive to craft brand identities that are unique yet timeless; ones that will stand out from the competition while still being recognizable years down the line. Our signature process starts with research into our client's industry, competitors, target demographic and more (Outspoke Vision). In the Outspoke Vision, we focus on understanding who exactly will be attending your event, as well as your company’s products & services. This helps us tailor our designs specifically toward your ideal client or customer, so they feel welcomed and excited when they arrive at the venue or engage online with content related to the event itself.

We then develop concepts based on this data before moving onto design execution and implementation of various marketing materials such as logos, signage, banners etc., as well as digital assets like websites and social media graphics.

And finally once guests arrive at your events you need something exciting waiting for them – whether it’s interactive activities or special performances – making sure everyone leaves feeling glad to be there.

You can ensure maximum attendance rates while delivering memorable experiences each time. Investing in professional services provided by experts who know what works best for each individual case will help you entice your ideal audience today and reach new heights of success within any industry.

Our signature process

Our signature process is designed to help event producers, meeting planners and event organizers create an unforgettable brand experience that entices, excites and expands their audience. We understand the challenge of managing a complex production with multiple vendors and team members. That’s why we have developed a four-step approach to make the most of our limited pre-production time while creating an engaging event brand.

We delve deeply into your audience to gain insight into their desires and requirements, thereby enabling us to create content that strikes a chord with them emotionally. Next, we focus on how best to entice your ideal audience by crafting compelling messaging that speaks directly to them. Once they are interested in attending the event, our goal is then to excite them about what’s in store for them at the venue itself through creative visuals and graphics as well as other interactive elements such as games or competitions. Finally, we explore ways of expanding your possibilities beyond just one single event by considering opportunities for ongoing engagement post-event through digital marketing campaigns or loyalty programs aimed at retaining customers over time.

1. Audience deep dive

Audience deep dive (Outspoke Vision) is the cornerstone & starting point for any successful event we take on. Analyzing the desired demographic of your event is critical to providing a satisfactory experience that will attract them back. By delving deeper into the attendees of your event, we can craft an experience that will draw them back time and again.

We start by researching our clients' target audiences through published surveys, interviews, focus groups and data available.

Once we have pinpointed our primary target audience, it is necessary to delve further into their preferences and motivations. What do they care about? What do they want out of an event? How can you provide value that goes beyond just entertainment or networking opportunities? Our research helps us identify these key insights so we can tailor the event experience accordingly.

By getting to the bottom of why someone would be keen on attending your event, instead of simply appealing to generic interests, you can create a distinct brand message that speaks to attendees emotionally and provides them with practical value. This could mean providing discounts or exclusive access for certain groups; hosting themed activities; collaborating with other brands; or designing custom content experiences tailored just for those in attendance (e-books/white papers/blog posts). With our sharpened understanding of what drives people towards your event, we are able to craft an experience that will entice them to come back again and again.

Finally, once all these pieces are put together into one cohesive strategy designed around your ideal audience’s wants and needs, it's time to implement. From designing eye-catching visuals; crafting compelling copywriting that speaks directly to potential attendees; leveraging social media platforms like Twitter or Instagram where appropriate; developing partnerships with relevant influencers... there are countless ways you can bring your signature brand story alive before launch day arrives.

By understanding the needs and wants of your ideal audience, you can create an event brand that will entice them to attend. Having a plan in place, it is now necessary to initiate steps for thrilling and increasing the reach of your intended crowd.

Key Takeaway: We take a deep dive into our clients' target audiences through surveys and data analysis, identify their interests and motivations to craft an enticing event experience that speaks to attendees emotionally and provides them with practical value. Leveraging creative visuals, copywriting, social media platforms and influencer partnerships we bring the brand story alive before launch day arrives.

2. Entice your ideal audience

When it comes to enticing your ideal audience, the key is in creating an event brand that will draw them in. You want messaging, visuals and positioning that make people feel like they belong – while at the same time making sure those who don’t fit the bill are repelled.

Ensure your message is succinct and straightforward. Make sure you know what kind of audience you’re trying to attract – whether it’s professionals looking for a networking opportunity or thrill-seekers looking for something new – so you can craft language that speaks directly to them. Use idioms and colloquialisms if appropriate; avoid industry jargon unless absolutely necessary.

Your visual treatment needs to match your message:

if you’re targeting young creatives, bold colors and playful graphics will go further than muted tones or traditional design elements; conversely, if you’re appealing to corporate types, sophisticated fonts and layouts might be more effective than quirky illustrations or bright hues. And whatever look you choose should reflect not only who your target audience is but also what makes this event unique compared with others out there on the market.

Positioning is just as important as messaging and visuals when it comes to enticement – so make sure yours stands out from all other events in your field by showcasing its USP (unique selling point). What sets this one apart? Is it an intimate gathering of experts? A star-studded lineup of speakers? An unbeatable location? Whatever makes this particular event special needs to be highlighted front-and-center in order for potential attendees to get excited about coming onboard.

Finally, remember that quality trumps quantity here: rather than casting a wide net hoping some fish bite eventually, focus on drawing those most likely to take action once they arrive at the door. These are the ones who will end up spending money on tickets (or whatever else) once inside.

Gaining an appreciation of your intended viewers and formulating a communication that resonates with them can help you draw the correct individuals to your event. To ensure an unforgettable experience, making your event atmosphere engaging and captivating is essential.

Key Takeaway: I'm looking to create a memorable event brand that will entice my ideal audience, so I need to craft messaging and visuals that speak directly to them using idioms and colloquialisms. My positioning should showcase the USP of this particular event in order for potential attendees to get excited about it, focusing on quality over quantity.

3. Excite your ideal audience at your event

Creating a signature experience for your event that will excite and entice your ideal audience is key to success. To ensure you’re creating the best possible experience, it’s important to consider all of the little brand touchpoints.

Logos, visuals, and other assets are essential in bringing your brand to life at events. It can be as simple as customizing menus or incorporating elements from your company logo into giveaways and decorations. With careful consideration of these details, you can create an immersive atmosphere that resonates with guests on a deeper level.

Experiential installations offer unique opportunities to engage with attendees while they're still in attendance at the event. For example, interactive photo booths or virtual reality experiences make great additions to any gathering. Incorporating AR elements into the event can further elevate the experience and create a lasting impression on attendees.

Instagram hotspots are a great way to get your guests involved and engaged during the event. From designated selfie walls to art installations designed specifically for social media posts, these types of content offer plenty of potential for exposure before, during, and after the gathering has concluded. By incorporating interactive elements such as augmented reality apps or games into your event planning strategy you can add an extra layer of fun that will keep people talking about it long after they've left.

Lastly, personalized menus are always appreciated by guests; not only do they add a special touch but also give them something tangible to remember their experience by afterwards - like a souvenir menu item. From cocktail names inspired by popular culture references to hors d'oeuvres themed around current trends - there's no limit when it comes adding flavor (and flair.)to any dining table setup.

By considering all aspects related to branding – from logos and visuals down to customized menus and experiential installations – you can easily create an unforgettable event experience tailored specifically towards exciting your ideal audience. With careful consideration of these details, you can create an immersive atmosphere that resonates with guests on a deeper level, offering unique opportunities for engagement while they are still in attendance at the event. Utilizing technology such as augmented reality apps or games adds an extra layer of fun and excitement that keeps people talking long after they have left the venue, while Instagram hotspots provide plenty of potential for exposure before, during, and after the gathering has concluded. Personalized menus also add a special touch that gives guests something tangible to remember their experience by afterwards - like a souvenir menu item.

By creating a memorable event brand, you can excite your ideal audience and make them look forward to attending the event. To expand on this further, it is important to consider how you can maximize your possibilities through effective branding strategies.

Key Takeaway: By incorporating custom logos, visuals and experiential installations into your event brand strategy, you can create an unforgettable experience tailored specifically towards exciting and enthusing your audience. Utilize technology such as AR apps or games to add a 'wow factor' that keeps people talking long after they have left the venue; plus personalized menus give guests something tangible to remember their time by - it's sure to leave them feeling like the cat who got the cream.

4. Expand your possibilities

Events can be a potent tool for constructing enduring connections with your followers. But how do you take that two day experience and turn it into lifetime loyalty? That's the ultimate ROI of your event brand.

When looking to expand your possibilities, you need to think beyond the basics of just putting on an event. To craft an unforgettable occasion that will leave guests eager to return, you must look beyond the typical event. To create a memorable experience, you can consider various strategies beyond simply organizing an event.

1) Offer Unique Experiences:

Think outside the box when it comes to what experiences you offer at your events. Consider adding activities like interactive workshops, art installations, or even celebrity appearances if appropriate. For an added touch, try offering interactive workshops, art installations or even celebrity appearances to make your event stand out from the crowd and attract more attendees.

2) Use Technology:

Leverage technology like virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), artificial intelligence (AI), and mobile apps to give guests an immersive experience they won’t forget anytime soon. This can be especially useful for larger events where tech tools allow guests access without having them physically present at all times – allowing them freedom while still keeping them engaged with the content offered throughout their time there.

3) Personalize Your Branding:

Create personalized branding elements such as custom logos, signage, and promotional materials that speak directly to each attendee’s interests – making sure they feel seen and heard during their time at your event is key. Doing so helps build trust between both parties which is essential in creating lasting relationships post-event too.

Ultimately, ensuring success is all about giving participants a memorable experience that will have them returning. This requires investing in premium branding solutions that provide maximum value over time rather than short term gains alone. With proper planning and execution, expanding possibilities through premium event branding is possible no matter what size or scope of event you're hosting next.

Broadening your prospects is an excellent way to guarantee that you are making the most out of every occurrence. With the right help, you can create an unforgettable brand experience for your audience and make sure they keep coming back.

Key Takeaway: Creating an unforgettable event experience is key to establishing long-term relationships with your audience. By offering unique experiences, utilizing technology and personalizing branding elements, you can make a lasting impression that will keep them coming back for more - "killing two birds with one stone" in terms of expanding possibilities while increasing ROI.

Need help with your next event?

It’s no secret that events are a powerful way to engage with your target audience. But what if you could do more? With an Outspoke Vision + Brand, you can take your event branding to the next level and create an unforgettable experience for your attendees.

Key Takeaway: We can help you create a memorable event brand that will entice, excite and expand your target audience by crafting an experience tailored to their needs. From designing custom visuals to organizing engaging activities at the venue, our team is ready to take your branding game up a notch.

FAQs in Relation to How to Create a Memorable Event Brand

• How do you create a memorable brand?

  Creating a memorable brand starts with understanding your audience. Developing an emotional connection to the event through creative visuals, meaningful messaging and engaging experiences will help build recognition and loyalty. Additionally, leveraging technology such as virtual reality or interactive activities can further enhance the event experience while helping to create a lasting impression on attendees. Finally, consistently delivering quality events that are well-branded across all platforms ensures guests have an enjoyable time and keeps them coming back for more.

• How do you create an engaging and memorable event?

  Creating an engaging and memorable event requires a combination of creative branding, innovative programming, and thoughtful customer service. Construct a distinct identity for your event that will captivate the intended crowd. Incorporate visuals into your marketing materials to help create an emotional connection with attendees. Ensure you have quality content that is tailored to their interests and needs. Finally, provide excellent customer service before, during, and after the event so attendees feel valued throughout their experience.

• How do I make my brand stand out at an event?

  Creating a premium event branding experience starts with creating an inviting atmosphere. Start by considering the audience's needs and preferences when selecting colors, textures, and design elements for your event space. Utilize creative marketing tactics such as social media campaigns to draw attention to your brand before the event even begins. During the event itself, provide engaging experiences that are tailored specifically towards your target demographic; this could include interactive activities or giveaways that reflect your brand identity. Finally, ensure you have strong visuals throughout - from banners and signage to promotional materials - in order to make a lasting impression on attendees. With these steps in place, you can be sure of standing out at any event.

• In what way branding could help in making the event successful?

  Branding is essential for a successful event. Creating an identity through logo design, color schemes, typography choices, messaging techniques and other visual elements helps to differentiate your event from others and make it more memorable for potential attendees. By using effective branding strategies such as logo design, color schemes, typography choices, messaging techniques and other visual elements you can craft a unique experience that will draw people in. Branding also creates trust between the audience and the organizer which encourages loyalty among customers who have attended previous events or are considering attending future ones. Ultimately, through strong branding you can entice new audiences while exciting existing ones - leading to increased attendance at your event.

Conclusion

With our signature 4-step approach, you can understand your audience's needs and wants better and entice them with exciting experiences that will expand their possibilities. Let us help you create an unforgettable experience for your next event.

Take the time to craft a unique event brand that speaks to your audience and stands out from the competition. With thoughtful design, you can create an unforgettable experience for all involved.

The Best Lead Generation Strategy for Your Coaching or Consulting Businesses (with Examples)

Most experienced consultants and coaches know that a one-to-many strategy is best for creating leads. Yet, few are doing them as a systematic, regular occurrence in their marketing calendar. 

You might already be presenting at conferences, symposiums, or other guest speaking opportunities when the invitation arises, but the real growth comes from creating your own events. 

The best strategy for generating leads isn’t an all-or-nothing approach or dependent on other people’s priorities and calendars. The best plan keeps your pipeline full and helps you continually build and develop relationships as part of your online platform in a way that builds trust and brings more like-minded people your way through referrals. 

What if instead of doing random events as part of your marketing strategy, you create a regular one-to-many transformation to give to prospective clients? This will allow for an authentic and mini-transformational experience with your brand.

This first step maximizes trust, memorability, and connection.

At Outspoke Design, we love to create mini transformations (or quick wins) in our clients’ businesses that are a practical and useful way to bring in new clients. 

To illustrate this, I’m going to give you three lead generation examples below. When most people think about online lead generation, they probably think about Google Ads, landing pages, or lead magnets like:

• Books

• Webinars

• Cheat sheets

• Checklists 

• Guides

• Video or audio training (mini-course)

• Challenges

• Quizzes

• Calculators

Each of these is great to get people on your mailing list, but they’re not delivering maximum value as a strategy. They need to be paired with an in-person component that is the gateway to building the know, like, and trust factor your prospects need to feel to buy.

What builds trust more for coaches than delivering a mini-transformation through a scaled opportunity to see what it’s like to work with you? That’s why a lead magnet works best when there’s a piece to do on your own and a piece to work on together as a group on a 1: many call. 

Here are three excellent examples of lead generation strategies:

Marisa Corcoran - The Copy Chat

As a copy confidence society alumna, I first got into Marisa Corcoran’s universe through a great lead magnet called 50+ Scroll-Stopping Subject Lines on her homepage. 

In that lead magnet, I got so many gems and three memorable strategies I could immediately implement in my copy. 

It built trust by providing valuable tips upfront and got me to join her mailing list and later her summit, The Copy Chat (which she used to produce annually but is now used as an evergeen lead magnet).

Listening to a few sessions of the Copy Chat solidified my trust and made investing in The Copy Confidence society (her signature cohort-based course) an easy investment. 

She delivered value at every brand interaction, so I jumped at it when I was presented with an offer.

Kelly Irving - Expert Author Coach

I recently came across Kelly’s work in another community we’re both a part of and was impressed with her lead generation method. 

Kelly Irving is a book coach for change-makers and trailblazers who offer a lead magnet to “Choose your best book idea in just 15 minutes” with her Book Screening Canvas. 

When you click through to download the canvas, you are invited to the next monthly live event, where she helps you work through the questions and areas in the canvas. 

This is a great way to get people started on the transformational journey and offer personal support to establish connections. Coaches can help at scale to multiply their impact without burning themselves out on individual support. 

Justin Welsh - LinkedIn 

Justin Welsh is an expert at creating a scalable content creation system for LinkedIn. He first catches your attention by creating highly engaging content on LinkedIn, and his profile is full of gems that further bring you into his world. Everything he demonstrates on his profile he teaches in his extremely affordable course [AFFILIATE LINK]—The LinkedIn Operating System. 

His lead generation strategy is his LinkedIn profile, which is optimized to get you on his mailing list, where he provides immense value (seriously, if you’re running a one-person business, do yourself a favor and sign up for The Saturday Solopreneur). 

There are so many non-spammy ways to generate leads, as seen in the examples above. You don’t have to creep people out in the DMs on LinkedIn (something that has become a thorn in many people’s sides) or spend way too much money on ads to generate leads. Instead, look for the strategy that feels most aligned with your brand.

Think: “What would be the most on-brand way for me to generate leads?”

If you’re an event producer, throw an event!

If you’re a podcast producer, produce your own podcast. 

If you enjoyed this article, be sure to sign up for the Outspoke Leader, where I’m breaking down how to create more courage, connection, and community in our work. 

7 Signs You’re Ready for a Stress-Free Launch

I recently sat down with a peer for a one-on-one during the middle of a big launch we’re managing for one of our clients.

She looked at me and said, “You don’t look like someone in the middle of a launch.”

I laughed. She was right.

I had enough time and space in my life to show up as my best self for our regular meeting without worrying about answering questions over email, sending passwords, processing payments, etc. This was because I designed the journey, created ideal branded touch points, and automated everything.

If your business relies on launches for revenue and your team wants to pull their hair out at every corner, you should know that you can achieve a calm and collected status, regardless of the size of your launch.

Here are a few signs you’re ready for a stress-free launch:

You have defined “what success looks like”

How many people do you want to sign up? The problem is that most entrepreneurs dream “as big as possible” while not defining enough to feel a sense of accomplishment and success. Is it any wonder how many of us struggle with depression and anxiety? Because if all you’re working for is as much as possible all the time, you can never acknowledge your transformation and growth. 

You have one central place for all client information

And it’s not a shared email box. You’ll want to capture pre-transformation points and measure them throughout your journey with your clients. Digging through old emails before a one-on-one call is not how you want to run your business. Furthermore, it’s important to measure an individual’s progress and benchmark their progress against that of their peers. This will allow you to see patterns and opportunities for strengthening the curriculum or creating some more strategic marketing for the next iteration of your program.

You have onboarding all set & automated

The main reason launches cause stress for people is because they haven’t taken the steps they need to automate & test everything.

Suppose a large influx of people comes into the system, and it’s not fully automated. In that case, you’ll be responding to emails, answering questions, and looking up passwords instead of engaging in a meaningful way. It’s the social equivalent of cooking dinner while your guests entertain themselves instead of being an engaging host.

You have up to two months of pre-launch content planned & produced

I’ve worked on 6 figure launches who’ve advertised to their warm email lists only, with a mention or two on social. You can only do this when your product or program has little to no competition.

The truth is that the bigger program launches have a two-month content plan with a mix of pre-recorded and live engagement opportunities. Creating this is a task in and of itself and takes months of work, but it doesn’t have to be stressful, and it can even be fun.

During the launch phase, the focus should be on engaging with potential customers instead of just creating content. 

You’ve mapped out the journey of your entire program

This goes beyond figuring out the curriculum. You also want to create milestones where your clients have achieved certain things by certain points of your program. 

Have you mapped how your clients feel at each stage of the process and how to use that to take advantage of designing your program? And for each point in the journey, have you outlined your communications, created supplementary materials, and pre-recorded any lesson videos you need?

You have multiple instances for feedback built into the program

One way to ensure clients have a great experience is by ensuring they know and feel like their coach is accessible. Creating a structure to accessibility through feedback surveys provides two benefits: clients always feel they have the opportunity to be heard (even if they don’t always take advantage of it), and you get a strategic insight about what they need at specific points in the program. Whatever you do, do not skip onboarding, end of the module, and offboarding surveys.

You have a team you trust

Managing all the moving pieces by yourself is hard. It helps to have a team to rely on so that, as the leader, you can focus on engaging with your audience when and where it matters the most.

You need space and time for your best ideas and support for bringing everything together for a launch. If not, you’ll find yourself scaling with people instead of with processes, which will only make the day-to-day harder and your next launch more stressful.

At Outspoke Design, we help our clients design, brand, and launch programs over two months, two weeks, or two days. 

The complexity of your launch depends on a lot of factors. But if your business is doing between $500K-$2M a year and you have a team of <10, let's connect for a 15-minute call to see if we can work together on your next launch.

7 Questions for Creating Audience-Centric Content

Many business and marketing questions can be resolved with strategic audience insight.

But even established businesses struggle to get insight from their audiences because they don’t have a process or methodology for collecting large-scale qualitative data.

You have a closer relationship with your audience as a coach or entrepreneur. Still, you may struggle to clearly understand what your audience wants, needs, or thinks.

You can’t prepare an offer, presentation, or sales copy without good audience insight, and you’ll be guessing instead of knowing. Or you’ll talk too much about everything from your perspective, making your messages irrelevant to the crowd.

Instead, you need to do more work to get into the minds of your audience before carving out your point of view. You need to get deep into their fears, frustrations, wants, and aspirations to know what messages will resonate or not.

This is a challenging exercise, but it doesn’t need to be. There are strategic questions you can ask and communities you can visit to get more insight into what is driving your audience’s decisions.

For years, we’ve worked with leaders on crafting stage content for both cold and warm audiences. In the case of cold audiences, we’d do our research to identify answers to the questions below. For warm audiences, we would use survey and polling results as the basis for crafting content that would resonate more.

Whenever you can help an audience learn more about themselves, you amplify trust and impact, which play well for your brand. 

(Questions below adapted and expanded from Nancy Duarte’s Slideology [AFFILIATE LINK])

1: What are they like?

Use demographic and psychographic research to get insight into their perspective. Find someone in that audience demographic and get to know them. Understand what the world is like from their perspective and how your narrative fits into it. 

2. Why are they here?

What are they looking to get out of your presentation? What is the transformation they want in their life that will take them from where they are today to where they want to be?

3. What keeps them up at night about your subject?

These are core human needs: safety, security, certainty, or rather, the lack of those things. What is it that bothers or disturbs them? Can you bring it to the forefront in a comforting way? 

4. How can you solve their problems?

Do you have an illustrative example of sharing? Can you think of any exercises that might help reframe their thinking? Can you demonstrate alternative paths they haven’t considered?

5. What do YOU want them to do?

What do you want them to change about how they currently do things? What action should they take after they read or listen to your content? Have you simplified this path to make it as easy as possible?

6. How might they resist?

What would keep them from adopting your transformation for themselves? Are these inner or outer forms of resistance? Can you counter them? How does your solution/idea/program help them?

7. How can you best reach them?

Are they visual learners? (HINT: 2/3 of all people are). How do you appeal to their head and heart in respective measures? 

Going further

If you had a direct “in” with someone in your audience, you could interview them, catch their language and find out what’s most valuable just by asking. The truth is that great conversion copywriters do this all the time, especially when helping to craft sales copy and offers. That’s why it’s great to take all the questions above and find where your audience already hangs out and read/listen to how they speak. 

With these questions in mind, try to come up with answers before working on your content. Facebook groups, Twitter, LinkedIn, Reddit– all of these communities collect and engage like-minded folks in themed communities. Try filtering for popularity and see what problems have a lot of engagement. 

Getting support

At Outspoke Design, we help our clients design, brand, and launch profitable programs over the course of two months, two weeks, or even two days. 

If you enjoyed this article, sign up for the Outspoke Leader, where we’re breaking down how to find greater courage, connection, and community in our work every two weeks. 

My Favorite Tech for Better Virtual Presentations

If your business depends on your ability to get your message out to your audience, then how you show up matters. You have to feel rested and confident.

One of the things I’ve noticed in working with transformational coaches is they’re often intimidated by audiences on Zoom & webinars. However, a 1:1 or small group call feels natural and even exciting.

It’s important to dig into the fear behind the feeling of intimidation and ask yourself these questions:

• Am I afraid of looking foolish if the tech fails? (Tech fails all the time)

• Am I afraid of looking unpolished because my gaze is slightly off due to the camera angle? 

• Am I afraid of losing my place and looking lost?

Show up to serve

This is almost the only rule you need to follow. Show up to be fully present, and you will work through tech glitches, find you know your content, laugh at yourself if you make a mistake, and your audience will feel your authenticity come through.

But if you want to get fancy…

Having a leveled-up Zoom background and camera can do a lot to instill trust and create a lasting impression. 

I’ve done my version of perfecting my camera set up to be able to make full audience eye contact on Zoom. I always get a lot of questions about my setup, so here’s what I use to run my Zoom events, webinars, and meetings for myself and clients. 

Please Note: Some of the links below are affiliate links—if you purchase through them, I may get a kickback. These are things I’m actively using daily and can enthusiastically recommend.

Computer

2020 Apple Mac Mini M1

This is the main computer that I’m running. It’s practically silent, great for streaming, and doesn’t cause me any headaches now that Adobe software is running natively on the silicon chip vs. Rosetta 2 as it had been before.

Luna Display

This tiny pink dongle plugs into my computer and makes my iPad a flippable display for the teleprompter. The flippable display is key because I’m running a teleprompter that needs a reflected surface to display content properly.

And before anyone runs out to stop me, I know about Apple’s Sidecar feature. It’s not enough right now, too laggy in responsiveness.

Elgato 4K CamLink

This tool connects my computer and my camera, and I’ve never had a problem with it working between the Mac & Sony camera. 

Teleprompter

Glide Gear TMP100 Teleprompter

I don’t even really use this as a teleprompter, and I use it as a second screen solely for Zoom calls. When you put the Zoom call window on the teleprompter and look at the gallery view or speaker view, you have a much more natural and aligned eye contact than without it.

If you’re running PowerPoint and sharing your screen, you can put the Speaker Notes view on the Teleprompter to access speaker notes while making eye contact easily. 

Computer

11 in iPad Pro

I love this iPad. It’s heavier than my old iPad pro, but the size is perfect for getting maximum screen resolution with the teleprompter PLUS it’s an iPad, so you can use it for all number of iPad things.

Sony A6400 Camera with 16-50mm lens

I’m so impressed with this camera. The quality looks professional and polished. It’s easy to use and very popular, so when you have a question on how to work with it, Google and  YouTube are your friends in finding an answer. I needed to figure out how to run a clean HDMI output and found help within one second of searching.

Elgato 21” S Main Pole

This attaches the teleprompter with the camera and iPad to my desk. 

Supplementary equipment

Elgato Keylight Airs x2

I’ve dabbled in photography enough to know that the quality of light most enhances the quality of photos/videos on the screen. These lights are customizable for color temperature, programmable into the Streamdeck for easy on/off, and never make my face too hot. 

Ideally, you want to be evenly lit on both sides, which is why I have two Keylight Airs in my set-up.

Elgato Facecam 

This is my second camera. It’s easy to switch cameras in Zoom, and this one’s great for when I’m doing screen walkthroughs because it’s right on top of my monitor and easier to make eye contact periodically. Since I’m running a MacMini, my computer doesn’t have a built-in camera. This camera is a surprisingly good value for the price & range.

Podmic

This guy is quite hefty but packs a huge vocal punch. I enjoy recording my voice because it makes my tones feel deep, crisp, and delightful. It needs an interface to run—I use this one which works for my purposes. 

Elgato Stream Deck XL

Besides being a sweet piece of eye candy and my daughter’s favorite toy on my desk, this is an easy way to program all the shortcuts you need for your daily workflow or running a virtual production.

Next

Interested in how we can help you level up your next virtual event?

You can always book a 15-minute call to see if it’s a good fit.

The REAL Danger of Slide Templates

It’s not hard to make a well-designed slide deck– you don’t even need a designer to do it.

There are so many tools and templates that help you create beautiful and uncluttered slides with as much effort as choosing and trying on a pair of shoes.

I’ve personally been grateful to Canva because I no longer get requests to do what it does effortlessly.

What are the biggest challenges with slide templates?

But how do you find the right template for your message from the thousands available?

Not everybody has a fully developed brand and supporting team behind them. If you do, your slide template is already chosen for you based on your brand.

If you don’t, you will have so many choices to make that you’ll spend too much effort where it’s not worth the payoff.

• Colours?

• Straight or curved edges?

• Charts? 2D or 3D (never use 3D)

• Photo overlays?

• Photo style?

Worrying about these details isn’t a good use of your or your team’s time.

What are the pitfalls of using slide templates?

Slide templates can be helpful when you know what you’re looking for and find it.

But in my experience, they usually lead to these common problems:

1. Because they’re easy to use, everybody uses them. Including your competition, from whom it might feel hard to stand out positively.

2. If you have a brand, you might need to conform your message to fit the guidelines, leading to run-of-the-mill, staid, and static stories.

3. For a lot of people, slide templates feel like positive play. But we’re not in pre-school sticking our hands in the sand and pulling out dinosaur figurines. You end up wasting time doing work that doesn’t matter. Instead, you can go for a walk in the neighbourhood to get a better frame of reference for a metaphor to deepen your audience’s connection to your presentation.

What do they want instead?

What’s the alternative?

Slides that make you feel confident. They make your brand feel premium, and you look like the expert you are.

Let’s accept for the moment that the medium is the message, then your slides are the stereo, either pissing off your neighbours or making them dance.

You can do this with a simple template process centered on you, and maximizes your audience’s understanding and ability to take action from your content.

What is your POV on this topic?

I think of slide templates as I think of presentation software.

They are TOOLS, not SOLUTIONS.

You can create great presentations with templates and save some design time, but if a template is your starting point, you will run into one of those three problems I mentioned above.

And truthfully, you’d be better off going to a cafe and culling your memory for anecdotes than scrolling pretty slides. You can also fall into the trap of putting content in the slides that you become attached to and don’t edit out to spare your audience.

The reason TED talks are great is not the slides.

The reason they’re great is that they’re under 20 minutes.

They’re under 20 minutes because they focus on the story and content, blocking out everything else.

Having a solid story and outline before touching your slides is what the pros do.

They spend weeks developing messages in their mind and on paper before starting slides.

A Final Note: Don’t Underestimate the Power of Storytelling

I once worked with a very famous keynote speaker on his deck for one of my client’s events.

Although he was a media personality and had a great camera and stage presence, he wasn’t a trained keynote speaker in the way those in the event industry think of them (think: ready-made and rehearsed talk, press kit, and all the accouterments).

We traveled a few weeks before the event to hash out the theme and structure of his presentation. This got him thinking about stories, which he did with the million other things he does.

We used the time we had at his place of business and home to hire a film crew and conduct some interviews with his team and community members. Over the next few weeks leading up to the event, we edited all of those video interviews to tell a story of his business’ environmental and social impact. That amounted to about 12 minutes of his presentation.

But the details of the actual stories he would tell on stage for his remaining 33 minutes were not forthcoming from the speaker despite numerous attempts to get them.

With each passing day, I was getting more into a panic. I began improvising. I created a visual model for the framework we discussed that he’d use to structure the stories. And we asked for a few photographs to add color to the stories he would talk about.

I never heard his stories until he gave his presentation in front of an audience of 200 people.

There were TEARS.

People opened their HEARTS and MINDS.

And a little later, they opened their WALLETS for charity.

Lesson learned: Trust yourself to be the bearer of your story, put your work into developing your content, and stop wasting time on slides—template or not.

Moving the room from their seats to action has almost nothing to do with the template you choose for your slides.

Does your presentation story need help standing out? Book an Outspoke Roadmap today.

The Key to Captivating an Audience? It’s How You Spend Your Time

This article is going to get a little philosophical.

We’ve probably never had less time than we do now,  yet our productive output has never been higher. The result is a world in which too many people and too many things are competing for our limited attention.

Why are we talking about this? Because this is the world you step into when giving a presentation.

And it’s even worse if you’re giving a virtual presentation because switching a camera off isn’t nearly as noticeable as getting up and leaving the room.

Will people keep their eyes on you? Or check their email?

Time is Precious

Leading a team means you don’t have full control over your time, and a certain percentage of your day is in service to helping others with their goals and outcomes. Being a parent means you don’t have full control over your time either.

You do control the time allotment of your presentation, but you don’t control much else like if people are paying attention to you. 

Constantly competing for the attention of your audience is exhausting. Add to that all of the worries we have about our own lives like Do I have enough money for retirement? Does my work even matter to anyone? 

Your work has an impact through presentations because it connects your output to others who can actionalize it. (I know “actionalize” isn’t a word, but it’s a word I use all the time to mean they take your thing and run with it and the result is a ripple effect of transformation).

What’s your experience with work/life balance?

I’ve noticed over years of honing my own productivity and output that nothing improves the quality, creativity, and effectiveness of my work like rest.

In the book The Artist’s Way, Julia Cameron calls this “filling the creative well” but this is not advice just for artists. You have to vigorously remove things from your responsibilities in order to take back your time.

You can’t make time for something without taking time from something else.

But people find it hard to accept that by saying yes to something, they’re automatically saying no to something else. But it’s true.

I’ll illustrate this with an example from my own life:

The year 2020 was a hard year for everyone. “Unprecedented” became a trigger word for me.

On January 1, 2020, we arrived home from the hospital after the birth of our daughter. We couldn’t wait to connect our little one with her grandparents who are in different countries.

Those first tender weeks were soon interrupted by closed borders. And we were cut off from our families for more than a year.

My partner and I never had the experience of being with babies. I was an only child, and she was the youngest of her family. Frantic Zoom calls, over-questioning, and anxiety-filled nights were the theme, along with unexpected joy, tears, and perseverance.

I was running my business through all of this chaos. Answering client emails, meeting deadlines, coming up with bold new themes and ideas for campaigns, designing slides until 2 in the morning, and giving virtual presentations to c-suite leaders across the country.

Pretending that the world around me was not the same dumpster fire I felt inside.

We all reach our breaking point, however. For me, it came in December of 2020.

• I was exhausted personally from having no time for myself and no energy for my family.

• I was exhausted emotionally from having my nerves constantly on high alert for a sustained period of time.

• I was exhausted financially from supporting our family as the sole source of support when we knew we wouldn’t qualify for any of the subsidy programs announced.

• I was exhausted creatively from clients who continued to ask me to work for money despite all of the above.

With that level of exhaustion and burnout, it’s almost impossible to see where to start healing and turn things around.

So what do entrepreneurs do when they can’t do anything?

We hire a coach, an expert to solve our problems for us and show us the way.

On my darkest night, I remember googling at 2 in the morning “how do you get over burnout fast without resting?”

The truth is I couldn’t heal until I made space for it.

You can’t heal burnout with a hack

We put our daughter in daycare. She started sleeping through the night eventually. We reconnected with our families once borders were open. I hired subcontractors, and stopped putting everything on myself.

Those things all had huge impacts, but nothing as huge as completely changing my business model to get rid of retainers that were financially secure but bankrupted my time.

I was like an employee with 8 different bosses, and because of burnout, I couldn’t even hear the one boss I needed to listen to: ME.

How I was able to do client work at all is still a mystery to me today. Because to do a great presentation you need to be your optimal self.

To have great presentation content you need to have space to be creative, see connections, and have a sense of purpose.

The more space we have, the higher quality of everything we produce, and the happier we become.

Where in your life can you say “No” to things? Where in your life can you delete, delegate, or defer? How are you putting yourself first?

Do you have any experiences in your own life of how you’ve reclaimed your time to make space?

5 Must-Haves for Running a Successful Webinar

I work with clients all the time who want to host a successful webinar. In 2022, we’re still not over webinars—doing them or signing up for them—even when we already have an unhealthy amount of screen time.

Before you host a webinar, you have to define what it is you want the webinar to do for your business.

Because just doing a webinar without a strategy won’t do anything except multiply your to-do list.

So let’s get into it! Here are the top five elements of a successful webinar. 

1. An Achievable Objective

Expecting to sell out a $2,500 course to an audience that isn’t familiar with what you do isn’t a realistic objective. But, if you’re a well-connected person with a decent size network, there’s no reason you can’t get 100 registrations and 20 show-ups. Managing expectations will help you reach an achievable objective.

2. An Engaged Audience

It’s great if your webinar attendees are already your audience and you’ve been nurturing them for at least 2 months. If you’re a new webinar host, partnering up with someone who has built up trust and authority with their audience can be hugely beneficial. In this case, you don’t necessarily have to have your own audience to have a successful webinar.

3. Virtual Confidence

When it comes to having confidence in front of a web camera, it can feel impossible. Don’t worry though, you can “fake it ‘til you make it” with some easy tricks.

• Familiarize yourself with the program—knowing which buttons to push in Zoom will help ease any pre-webinar anxiety.

• Worry less—everybody gets a little anxious, the key is how bad does that anxiety come across. Take deep breaths, you’ve got this.

• Ask for help—if you can’t handle it, grab your assistant or someone to help you when you need it.

4. Slick Slides 

The pace of slides for virtual events is 1 per minute or faster; the constant screen refreshes make it more likely your audience will pay attention. But, you also need good quality content that builds on itself. 

5. Time & Effort to Fill Your Webinar

One of the reasons our clients like to hand off webinar creation details to us is so that they can focus on connecting with their networks to increase registrations.

Set a goal for your webinar attendance and know that show-up rates aren’t what they used to be.

In the days before webinars were prolific, you could get a 50% or more live show-up rate.

These days, 20-30% is STANDOUT performance.

Last Thing I’m going to Say:

Webinars can be a great tool to connect with your audience, but whether you need one really depends on the goals of your business. If you have an audience that is hungry for what you’re making and the price point is low, you don’t need a webinar to sell it.

The price point doesn’t even have to be low to be successful. In the past year, we helped one of our clients have $200K launches on a $2K+ live seminar series because their existing audience had expressed desire for the training and no other competing offer existed.

We sold it without a sales page!

So if you’re struggling to know whether a webinar will help your business, book a 15 minute fit call.

The Best Way to Guarantee ROI from Your Next Event

Events are a great way to meet a multitude of business objectives, such as:

• Improving sales results

• Rallying a group of people together behind your cause

• Generating leads

• Creating new peer connections

• Increasing staff morale to have one isn’t a light one. 

Events can be beneficial, but they aren’t easy to make happen. There are many moving parts, considerations, and expenses tied to each part of the process. Even if you invest in an event producer (well worth any busy person’s time!), you will still have a lot of decisions to make and bills to foot. 

But most leaders would invest any amount of money if they knew they would make it back.

If planned and executed correctly, most events have a quickly calculable return on investment. Events are, quite simply, the most bang for your buck in a communications or marketing setting. They amplify trust while at the same time multiplying impact; there’s simply no equivalent tactic and probably never will be.

A quick note is that I use communications to describe the world INSIDE your company with your stakeholders and marketing to describe the world OUTSIDE your company with your audience of prospective or current clients, customers, or followers.

At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter if your budget is $20K or $2M. If you haven’t defined what success would look like, you are setting yourself on a difficult trajectory. Why? Because you won’t have determined where to focus your efforts, you’ll feel frantic trying to do all the things and overlook details.

Whenever we’re starting a new event or launch for a client, I know that they will want to do all the things. And often, they have the budget to do all of them too. More often than not, our primary constraint is time, not money. 

When you’re a specialized resource in high demand, you know you could do everything, but you shouldn’t. 

To help decipher which goals you want to achieve for your next event, ask these essential questions:

“What would success look like?”

This question defines the first filter through which all decisions about your event should be made, and it also sets up the basis for measuring success. 

Will the event be a success if people simply show up? Enroll? Take a specific action? How are you going to measure it? What are the existing benchmarks, if any?

“What would this look like if it were the most on-brand for us?” 

This helps you to find the highest impact moments of design or intervention. It might be a concierge welcome experience, a hotel room welcome package, or an event app. 

“How do we surprise and delight our audience?”

This is magic. 

In communications settings, it’s often just expectation escalation. You produce a fantastic experience one time, and the same audience expects the same or better next time. You fall into a cycle of thinking, “There’s no way we can top this!”. But if you ask this question, you’ll find space for creativity and pushing the envelope. 

In marketing settings, these are often physical things that you giveaway, but they don’t have to be. We can all picture an audience full of fans getting excited about Oprah’s favorite things, which is definitely on-brand for Oprah!

Once you have success filters for your brand, you can find a unique way to add surprise and delight your audience. 

Some final thoughts

It doesn’t necessarily matter if you use my filters, but having at least one filter will help you better allocate your resources for the crunch that events naturally create. Events are a high, but they can become a low quickly when you’re just struggling to keep up with the tide of work required.

Apply filters and amplify the experience–both yours and your audience’s.

I often say that launches don’t have to be stressful, and it’s because of these filters and having enough space to prepare adequately. 

If you’re struggling with discovering the top goals for your next event, getting our perspective with an Outspoke Roadmap may be just the thing. Check it out and see if we can help with your next event. 

How Sharp Is Your Brand's Edge?

In today’s oversaturated economy, brands need to have an edge to stand out.

Decades ago, businesses simply needed a friendly message and a memorable visual to launch a successful venture.

That strategy may have worked then, but not having an edge will hold you back in today's information-drenched market. Without an edge, you become an ingredient instead of the chef.

Your audience will forget your brand when they return to their daily lives.

You won't stand out enough to attract an ideal client.

You won't be remembered to be booked for a keynote.

You won't "walk the walk" enough for people to trust your brand and invest in you.

But edges can vary in sharpness.

From as sharp as a straight razor's blade to as dull as the butter knife you inherited from your grandmother.

Working with leadership brands, I’ve found three of the most common levels of “edge” when it comes to branding.

Let's dive a little deeper into our metaphor.

Butter Knife:

Congeniality + Take = Brand

The Butter Knife formula is the dullest blade; you'll cut through room temperature butter but not much else. Founders with brands in this category are driven by fear, even though it takes a lot of courage to start a business. The truth is that the courage required to start a business is only a fraction of the courage needed to create a brand that truly cuts through.

Steak knife:

Congeniality + Oppositional Take = Brand

This formula gets you closer to standing out, but it takes more work for you and your audience. You have to first make yourself "liked" before you risk sharing an oppositional perspective. This approach to establishing a brand also requires your audience to remain interested through the congeniality phase to experience a shift in their perspective. If you hope to gain attraction by staying status quo first to earn trust and then shift perspective, you risk your audience not sticking around for the transformative moment.

Double-edged sword:

Pattern Interruption + Oppositional Take = Outspoke Brand

This is the brand edge sweet spot; you understand the fundamental thinking behind what drives a great brand.

The first edge of the sword–Pattern Interruption–attracts the maximum amount of attention, and you cut through the noise and stop the scroll.

The second edge–Oppositional Take–shifts your audience's thinking and positions you as the authority on this new perspective. When they start thinking about things differently, they'll refer to the moment of insight they had when they came across your brand.

So, how do you sharpen your brand's edge? Here are three key actions to take:

Tone of Voice

Writing (as opposed to speaking) dulls our tone of voice.

That’s why it’s important to put in the effort to write more like we speak.

This isn’t always easy to do for those of us who have climbed the corporate ladder; however, establishing a unique voice will result in brand recognition and loyalty.

Notice what’s unique about the way you speak, and infuse it in your writing.

Defiance

Naturally, going against the grain is attractive because as humans, we’re wired to look for danger. Our eyes immediately see something that moves into our field of vision. Our ears automatically perk up when something's amiss. When your stance is defiant, people automatically pay attention.

Get Specific

Founders often struggle with wanting to appeal to everyone; however, this is probably the number one mistake they make. In wanting to appeal to everyone, you appeal to precisely no one. It’s important to find the courage to niche down, cut sharper, and improve results.

How to Find Your Edge

Because I work primarily with entrepreneurs and leaders who've already achieved some level of success, I tend to work with steak knife or double-edged sword brands.

From personal experience, I know it's hard to identify your edge on your own. You may have some idea, but the clarity and insight brought by an outside perspective can be transformative. Years of self-awareness, journaling, and discovery will only continue to obfuscate what is obvious to a brand strategist in a 90-minute interview.

If you’re struggling to find your edge and level up your business, book an Outspoke Roadmap and get the strategy you need to cut through to your ideal clients.

Saving Time with Slide Libraries

Companies of all sizes waste hundreds of hours on sales slide decks, pitches, and proposals throughout the year.

Furthermore, creating these behemoth documents is often demoralizing for teams already saddled with too much to accomplish in too small of a timeframe.

But slide decks are often critical for sealing big deals.

You’ve built a relationship with a prospective client and get asked to put everything together in a deck. What do you do? 

Make Your Deck Irresistible 

Decks are where decisions go to die.

Building tons of text-heavy slides is the worst way for a brain to process information, especially when your prospective client is already weighing a big investment. 

So, how do you balance the need to answer client questions without creating more questions in the minds of your prospective clients?

If decks are where decisions go to die, how do you put together a deck quickly without killing the deal?

Remember: Sales Should be People-to-People

You should be focusing on your relationship with the client instead of fiddling with PowerPoint.

You should be writing an on-point executive summary instead of guessing what your decision-makers value the most.

And you should be able to easily start a deck from a beautifully designed, pre-vetted slide library that’s ready for customizing with the ease of a click.

Pitches & Proposals Are a Necessary Evil

They’re the last gate to money.

The last gate before the VC writes a check.

The last gate before your client signs an MSA.

Companies that do pitches well have minimized the pain they cause by hiring dedicated team members, standardizing commonly-requested content, and investing in proactive business development to increase the chances of getting deals outside the procurement pipeline.

Before founding my own company, I wrote hundreds of these documents for deals ranging in size from $20K to $2M.

In the process, I developed my own shortcuts that proved successful. 

5 Things You Need to Save Time with Slide Libraries

When creating a slide library for your organization, these are the things you need to have.

1. Beautifully embedded branding

Your brand comes through your company voice, colors, slide elements, and other design choices.

Are you bold and independent? Or are you serene and collected?

Branding increases the amount of trust your prospective client will have in your company. Branding makes you and your prospects feel confident about moving forward.

2. Accessible platform

Your team needs ready access to be able to create decks.

Keeping your documents preserved in InDesign adds an unnecessary burden to the people trained to use the program.

Your sales team should be in the field with prospects most of the time—not answering RFP questions to RFPs in decks.

Choose a platform that has collaborative editing capabilities so that more than one person can be working on the deck at a time. My personal favorites are Google Slides and Pitch.

3. Dedicated support

It may be a marketing team, freelance designer, or superstar assistant, but have one person own the document and see it through to completion before the deadline.

Please don’t make it the same person for every deal. Doing so is a fast path to burnout, regardless of the company's size.

4. Content edited for brevity

Through the process of multiple reviewers, content unnecessarily gets too long and rambly.

Multiple people writing in one document means everyone is adding while no one is cutting.

Appoint someone on the team who can be a ruthless editor for brevity and clarity, and expect to shave off about 30 percent of unnecessary verbiage at the end.

5. Single source of truth

One master template to rule them all. Company stats, highlights, testimonials, etc., change over time. Replicating the latest version is essential to saving time with slide libraries. Implement a process reviewing every document to ensure the latest information is included and any new information captured.

Where do you go from here?

Does your team want help standardizing and lifting your starter sales deck?

Schedule an Outspoke Roadmap today. We’ve worked on sales decks across many industries and have a track record of success applying best practices to save your team time and sanity.

5 Ways to Take Your Presentation to the Next Level

Presentations catalyze and catapult your success

Presentations are complete game changers for your business, career and life, but only when they’re done superbly well.

They can take you from no clients or no audience to overbooked and sold out in one standout session.

At work, being a skilled presenter will get you more interesting projects, promotion opportunities and leaders reaching out directly to you. You will invite more opportunities to grow at a rate faster than any other performance measure.

Why do presentations get so much attention? It’s not an oversaturated market. Despite the number of PowerPoints people must suffer through daily, most people will do everything they can to avoid giving a presentation due to a fear of public speaking.

So those who do them well shine to the nth degree with only a fraction of the energetic investment needed to get there.

Leaders, on the other hand, know that presentations are a critical foundation to your (and your organization’s) advancement.

But they’re not easy to master

Even the most seasoned speakers and leaders face challenges in managing time. Furthermore, an 18 min TED-talk style presentation can take 100 hours to develop. A shorter presentation time often means more work to make it impactful not less, and on top of all your leadership responsibilities, you’ve got a high-performance lifestyle and household to look after.

So when you need to edit for clarity, concision and insight, where do you look for your info and data points? Who helps you pull together the most relevant case studies or illustrative examples to demonstration your points?

Confidence in speaking really comes from two things: 1) Knowing your material 2) Practice in front of an audience. You will never completely eliminate speaking anxiety, but with continual practice and exposure, you get less sensitive to the impacts anxiety may have on your performance.

How do you handle presentation opportunities?

Do you worry about putting your audience to sleep?

Or getting called out on something and causing disagreement.

What about looking bad?

The truth is that most presenters I see are afraid of speaking, so they stay in their heads and work on their talks by working on the slide decks using formatting tools instead of speaking or writing.

They test out new colours instead of new angles.

They polish punctuation instead of curating better stats.

They read instead of speak to practice.

Presentations deserve your best attention

Most people spend 90% of their effort making only a 5% improvement to their presentations, and you have limited time, so you want to focus where it matters.

Over my career I’ve built 100s of presentations, masterclasses, events and pitches.

Presentations all start the same way—we focus on getting the information we want to convey out of our head BUT where we should start instead is with getting into the heads of our audience.

Focus where it matters—your audience

Speakers get counterproductive advice from the speaking coach industry all the time about blocking, memorizing and performing. Those things will elevate your presentation, but none of that stuff matters if what you’re saying doesn’t resonate with your audience. Unlike speaking coaches, I’m a trained writer & designer, not a trained actor. I like a stage for the platform it provides my ideas, not the spotlight it gives to shine.

For me, presentations are 100% about your audience. They are not about you, your insecurities, your ego or your talent. Leave that all on the stairs up to the podium and give your audience content that shifts their world view.

You’ve probably heard about Mel Robbin’s famous 5 second rule TED talk. Well, did you know the actual title of her presentation was “How to stop screwing yourself over”? The 5 second rule was a concept she introduced toward the end of her presentation! Instead, it was the AUDIENCE that ran with it and brought it to life—turning 5 Second Rule into a best-selling book and Mel Robbins into a household name, friend of Oprah and champion of thousands of people getting what they want in life.

Who says your idea can’t be the next 5 second rule?

Below are some of my favorite ways to get audience-centric with your presentations.

1. Get away from the computer

Most presenters work on their presentation by working on the deck. Instead, get away from the computer. No one has their best ideas sitting behind a screen.

Get out into the world and find inspiration in an unlikely space. Take pictures. You might notice that an unusual French pastry’s construction is the perfect metaphor for your new strategy while also finding an interesting story to captivate people’s attention.

2. Create a branded experiential takeaway

I’ve seen presenters spend thousands of dollars on sponsorships only to rely on the “contact me” slide at the end of their deck to capture leads. If you’re not offering a valuable takeaway for your audience already, you’re missing an opportunity.

No time to create one? Include a QR code at the end of your deck to a landing page where in exchange for email, audience members can get a copy of your slides. It takes an extra 10 minutes to set up.

3. Start a story vault

Have you ever noticed how charismatic leaders always have great stories to tell?

The C-suite I’ve worked with have developed effective stories over time because they’re always sharing and refining. But they’re less like writers in gathering them and more like comedians in refining and testing them for audiences.

But the truth is, if you’re not actively reflecting and developing new stories regularly, you’re not improving the breadth of your stories.

One of the best methods I’ve seen to do this is Homework for Life via Matthew Dicks. Your day memory doesn’t have to be longer than Excel row.

4. Keep it to 3 main points

When’s the last time you saw a 40 minute long presentation carved up into 7 section dividers?

Or signed up for an online course only to face the course homepage with 47 modules staring back at you?

Your presentation is not a textbook. This isn’t a table of contents. Your audience is getting information from you via audio and slides—and once you get to chapter 7, you’re not going to remember what was in chapter 1.

Presentations are the Twitter version of business content. You’ve got 30 minutes to convey as much information as 47 modules, and you’re not writing a textbook.

All the neuroscience is clear when they recommend keeping it to 3 main topics. If you have to have more, bucket those ideas into three main topics. You never need to stray away from it. Human working memory is limited to 3 maybe 4 ideas, so if you have 7, people will member the first one, the one that connected the most with their own thoughts/stories, and the last one. Don’t waste your effort on more than 3.

5. Use 100% your own content.

That means photos and words.

Some of the most engaging slides my presenters have shared are just photos of a family vacation or visit to a factory after a natural disaster or someone testing out a new prototype.

No other slide content is more effective than visual proof from your own life. When you have this level of visual evidence, it naturally solidifies your authority not only as a leader but also a visionary.

Think of how you can visually illustrate your content and get some photos.

Don’t be afraid to experiment

There are so many ways to make your next presentation unique, memorable and effective while showing up as your best self on stage.

But it takes a team to make it happen!

My Outspoke Roadmap could be just the thing to take you from good to great presenting. In it, we take a 360 view of your presentation opportunity and identify the best areas for you to focus on so you can get the most return of your time, money and energy.

Want to find out if it’s right for you?

Why Speaking Out Works Better Than Speaking

You don’t have to smack your audience to get their attention, but actually you kind of do. 

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I want you to think back right now to your school days. 

Remember the kid who could never do anything right, who bullied others and who never apologized unless forced to?

Yeah, that kid. 

That kid for me was Zack.

Every year whenever the homeroom class list was posted in the newspaper, you prayed he wouldn’t be in yours. 

On one field trip, we all were stuck with this mean kid in the back of our daycare director’s station wagon. He was pulling our hair, kicking, pinching and anything he could do to get a reaction. Our daycare supervisor witnessed it all from the rearview mirror.

The next day the director made Zack sit on a chair while we all took turns hitting him back one-by-one. His reaction to most of this was to laugh. If the point of this misguided retaliation was to teach him a lesson, surely it failed.  

But did it ever teach me a lesson! I never forgot this kid. And I never forgot this incident. And I never forgot the amount of negative attention it attracted. 30+ years later, I still feel viscerally about the incident.

An eye for an eye leaves the world blind, you could say, or to hit another cliché, the squeaky wheel gets ALL.THE.DAMN grease. The kid with all the problems attracts all the attention. The president with the sordid past and scandalous rhetoric overshadows the havoc he reaps behind the scenes.

The same principle applies to your messaging in the eyes of your ideal audience. It doesn’t need to be negative, but it does need to contrast with what they already know. 

Because your messaging doesn’t matter if no one can remember it. 

And the best way to make something memorable is to make it contrast with what people are already thinking. We’re evolved to pay attention to problems, to what’s different. That’s why you can’t just speak but speak out. 

Speak out to be memorable

Your message will be ignored if it’s not different enough. We are trained to tune out what sounds too similar to what we know and are looking for the “danger” in what we don’t. 

As thought leaders, we often plan for information before planning for attention, but there’s no way to get to sharing information without attention first. And in an information age, attention is a lot more sparse than information. 

That’s why 80% of your article’s success is in the title you choose.

Or why 80% of your course’s launch success is in making the right offer.

And it’s why 80% of your next talk’s success is in how much you’re willing to go against what your audience believes. 

Speaking out might mean you’ll be misunderstood or misheard or ignored, the same things that will definitely happen if you just speak. 

There’s simply no way to mitigate all the risk of your messaging not striking a chord with everyone. If you do, you can be sure it won’t land on anyone.

On the contrary, my friend

You can’t have a message if it isn’t somewhat contrarian. You have to gain trust and create a shift to build the kind of business that requires people to change. Maybe you want them to stop smoking. Maybe you want them to buy your services.

Most people think speaking out is for troublemakers or anti-social elements. But in today’s world, there is nothing without attention, and there’s no attention if you don’t contrast with the reigning ideas in your field. 

Example

Jane and Joe are presenting a new company-wide 5 year strategy. Their audience is warm, 2,000 of their own people (whose salaries they’re paying). Attention is given, or at least assumed to be there. The difference in their main message is this:

• Joe says, “We’re going to grow 5% year over year by hiring the best people.”

• Jane says, “We’re going to be out of business if we don’t hire the best people,” and paints a picture of the war for talent and what’s at risk. 

You immediately pay more attention to Jane’s message, even though at their core they are essentially the same message. 

A real-life example

Tim Cook gave a commencement speech at Tulane University where he famously said, “There is a saying that if you do what you love, you will never work a day in your life.”

The person who made that line famous? None other than Tim Cook’s own predecessor, Steve Jobs.

But Cook continued. “At Apple, I learned that is a total crock,” Cook said. 

Leaders of the same company in the same position, but Tim knew the stakes of memorability vs forget-ability meant that he had to contrast with not only what the audience already thought but also with what his predecessor put out into the world. 

Instead, Cook said that when you find a job you are passionate about, you will work hard, but you won’t mind doing so.

And I don’t think Steve Jobs would disagree.

In this instance, you can have the appearance of disagreement while agreeing with the heart of the message.

And that’s the magical place where sparks light up and hearts open for your audience.

What’s next for you?

If speaking out were easy, everyone would be honest all the time, and we’d never have to dig beneath the surface to find truth. 

You could walk into your CEO’s office, tell him the new strategy is destined to fail, and list the reasons why. 

But the world isn’t like that. We’re wired to protect ourselves, our reputations and our relationships, such that speaking out sometimes feels like it isn’t an option.

I help my clients find the ways to use boldly outspoken messaging to create deeper connections with themselves, their audiences and their businesses. Doing so leads creates mores space for authenticity and memorability.

5 Ways to Connect Better With Your Audience

Think about your favorite people in your life--your inner circle. Your best friends, your family, your colleagues. 

Did you have to try to make a connection with them when you first met? Did you have to go out of your way to appear better than you were to draw them in? Did you have to meticulously plan your words or manage your feelings? 

When I met my best friend in 2004, we sat next to each other for the first day of class and were immediately partnered off for introductions.

Despite being forced to work together and use a second language that we only had a beginner's command of, we were endlessly fascinated with each other from the get-go.

When all we could say to each other in that conversation were things like, “I like soup” or “I want to be a diplomat,” it didn’t matter.

That summer we became inseparable, and to this day, he’s the first person I want to call when I need to celebrate, cry, get advice or laugh.

When we show up as ourselves, the people around us show up as their selves too. 

And everybody is more ready to connect with one another, without façades, without hang-ups and without pretending to be better than we are (because the foibles are what make us endlessly fascinating).

This is what magnetic speakers do to their audiences. 

Audiences come away feeling more alive, more proud of who they are and more connected to the speaker ready to move mountains. 

Connecting is the first level of what you need to create trust and be memorable. If you don’t connect with your audience, you might as well be practicing for yourself in front of a mirror. 

The problem is that we often change ourselves based on who the audience is.

We’re one person when we’re at home, one person when we’re with ourselves, one person when we’re with colleagues and then this totally self-conscious monster when we’re in front of an audience. That’s why more people are afraid of public speaking than death. And that fear drives us to total lunacy, when the reality is that it doesn’t need to be so hard. 

When we get in front of people, our brains get in the way of emotional resonance. We’re too worried about how our audience will see us. That worry prevents you from being fully yourself in front of your audience and creates a barrier to connection. 

If you forgo opportunities to speak and grow your profile, you’re only going to live out a fraction of your potential. There is no marketing that can grow yourself, your audience or your business with more impact than speaking in front of your ideal audience. 

You might be afraid in speaking that people won’t listen or understand what you say, or worse, that people won’t like them! Secretly we all want to be liked, so we water ourselves down to be attractive to the most common denominator, and in doing so, we repel the passionate love of our lives who would never settle for ordinary. This is the same thing for attracting your ideal clients--you have to be yourself to attract people who already like you. 

You deserve nothing less than your ideal audience, people with passion for you and your ideas. To attract them you need to be open to connecting with them wholly as yourself first. You don’t need to be a better version of yourself to attract a better audience, you just need to own who you are unapologetically. 

You have to speak with courage which means being ready to accept yourself & flaws and possibly repel some people while you attract those who will matter the most to you. 

Most leaders think bold messaging matters. That’s not new. But in this age of leadership transparency, you have to also find ways to be unapologetically yourself to be relatable and memorable. Mistakes make you human. Eliminating all the flaws from your presentation eliminates your personality. 

I present imperfectly all the time. Am I proud of it? No, of course not. But I know that the strength of my performance is in showing up and being present, not in being overly polished. Now I never recommend to be unprepared, but should you be unprepared, needing to speak in front of people shouldn’t be a recipe for disaster but instead an opportunity ripe for connecting with your audience and being wholly yourself.

Here are 5 ways you can connect better with your audience.

Understand what makes you different. How do you convey this in your messaging and in your performance? 

The brain doesn’t pay attention to things that are the same. So if you are too alike or aligned with what your audience already thinks, you won’t be memorable. At the same time, the brain also avoids things that are too out there or different--it senses danger and will protect you with avoidance.

You want to put things out there in the world that only you could have created. They’re full of your stories, your personality and your energy. For example, when I’ve worked with CEOs on their content, it’s not the stats or figures that attract attention (well, maybe in an accounting firm), but the CEO’s take on how we got here and the human impact of progress. That personal perspective makes all the difference between something that is forgettable and something that can spread.

Understand what keeps your audience up at night about your topic

We’re all driven by hidden worries, even if we’re adamant about getting rid of the fears that hold us back. You need to show your audience that you understand them by speaking in their language, using references from their worldviews, and  

What does your audience know already, and how can you show that AND build their learning foundation?

While not everything can be paradigm shifting, you need to be able to shift your audience’s understanding of their own worldview to start the transformation. 

Test your stories with a loved one

Do you get an emotional reaction from someone who already knows, likes and trusts you? If not, you can do better. 

I’ll tell you a story about how I learned this. I always got great marks and attention for my writing in school. My teachers regularly told my parents that I had a gift and to encourage my fullest self-expression. I had stories that got published locally, and I would win contests and had my first paid writing job at age 14 working for our town’s newspaper as a student reporter. 

It was around that time that I cracked the code for what would be “publishable” by instinctually writing everything for my mom. If I was going for heartfelt, I’d write it to make her cry. If I was going for inspiring, I’d write it to make her eyes well up (but not fully cry). If I was going for interesting, I’d write it for her to go “Hmmm.” When I gave her things to read and got the expected emotional reaction from her, I knew it passed the test. 

Practice being “you” when it feels uncomfortable. 

Let’s look at run of the mill interactions and how you can get more personal. For example, when you drop something off at the dry cleaner, be honest why you got that wine stain. Let the person get a full glimpse into who you are. Maybe they’re going to judge you--so what?! That’s the whole point. You don’t need to apologize for who you are, and it’s humbling to practice being the full you, irrespective of the other person. 

What’s next?

Starting to care about connecting your audience is only the first step, and I applaud you. 

A lot of non-professional presenters are just looking to give information without considering the audience’s perspective, so you’ve already set yourself apart.

If you take nothing else from this article, remember this:

You deserve to connect with your audience based on the real “you.” No fakery or over-polishing involved. No making videos of yourself and counting or cutting the umms. 

Be more “you” and your audience will help you grow into the fully self-expressed leader you were born to be. 

If this were easy, everyone would do it.

But that’s not you. You’re a proven leader who has a lot of value, vision and care to offer the world. So get going! And if you need guidance on what to do next, let’s see if we’re a fit.