4 Goals For Your Next Speech, Pitch or Presentation

Ask yourself – what is my core message? Another way of asking this question is – what is the main thing I want my audience to leave with after my presentation? Let’s look at 4 goals for your next speech, pitch or presentation.

Most speakers deliver a great speech, without achieving a certain goal. They speak in several directions, make a lot of good points, give fantastic examples and tell great stories, but in the end find themselves in the middle of nowhere. You need to be sure from the start of what you are trying to accomplish with your speech.

Every speech must have a main goal. The goal could be either to persuade, inform, inspire, or entertain the audience. The best speech is a combination of all four, but one should be the backbone of the speech.

Be very specific about what you want to achieve. In this second step, it is important for you to write down your main goal. Here are some examples of specific goals:

–  I want to persuade the audience to stop eating processed food.
–  I want to inform the team of the new building project at 280 George street and cover each department’s responsibilities during the meeting.
–  I want to inspire the audience to write their own book in 9 months.
–  I want to entertain the audience to laugh about silly mistakes we all make as human beings.

Write your specific goal before you compile your speech. Try and make it as specific and detailed as possible. Everything you are going to do from here on needs to be in line with your goal.

Remember, if this goal is not clear to you, it won’t be clear to your audience.

Persuasive type speeches are aimed to convince people to think or do things differently after they heard your speech. Informative type speeches are aimed to share knowledge and insight on a subject, and leave the audience to decide for themselves. Inspirational speeches are to empower people to want to step up and achieve more. And lastly, entertaining speeches are to ensure that people are laughing and have a good time.

I cannot stress how important it is to write out your goal in detail for your presentation. This will help you to gain clarity of what you want to accomplish. Your goal needs to be specific, for example: I want to persuade my audience to use less salt and sugar in their diet. Note that this goal is very concrete and specific. Try to avoid at all costs using abstract vague words or sentences that do not really mean something. For example: I want to persuade my audience to be healthier. This is not a good goal for your presentation and you will struggle to put your presentation together.

Now that you have a concrete, specific goal, design your presentation to make sure that you achieve this goal at the end of your presentation. All your data, stories, information, case studies, facts, figures, analogies, and illustrations need to be aimed at achieving this goal.

While you are writing your presentation, ask yourself constantly, is this information in line with my goal, if it is not, leave it out. Some people believe they have to include all their research and facts and knowledge in their presentation and leave the audience to decide for themselves what is important. It is your job as a speaker and presenter to filter out all the noise and clutter and give your listeners good-quality content.