Episode #262: What Is Your Message

Are we clear enough about our message? There are some common problems around getting the messaging right. We have no clear message and the audience don’t quite know what to make of the talk. Or we have so many messages, the audience are confused and cannot attach to any of the messages. This is an exaggeration, but we should be able to write our one key message on a grain of rice. The point is to make the message clear and get it down to the minimum number of words to describe it. This is really tough. Rambling and waffling on are easy, whereas being precise is hard work. This explains why most talks haven’t boiled everything down to one clear message and the presentation fails or misses the mark.

If we are thinking of a topic to speak on or if we are asked to speak on a certain topic, the first major effort will be to find the key message. This sounds straightforward, but there are so many angles from which to approach a topic, we need to select the best one and then clarify it. The best one will be determined by our audience analysis. Who are we going to be speaking to and what message will resonate the most strongly with them? If we don’t know who our audience is we need to find out. In episode number 260 we went into more detail on just how to do that, so please go back and listen to that episode.

Getting the key message clear is also important when it comes to promoting the talk. Our title will get sent out to the prospective audience and if we have done our audience analysis well, then there will be a high degree of resonance with our target group. Getting the title right makes such a difference and we all know that. We respond to certain titles more than others. If we can hone in on the key interest, then our audience numbers will fill up and we will set the stage to deliver our message. I was attending a talk recently and there were only about 30 people online. Given the speaker and the quality of the content, it should have been 100 people at least. The title let the talk down and didn’t grab attention, because the message and the audience analysis hadn’t been given enough attention.

Once we have crafted our one key message, we need to look for content which supports that key message. These are like chapters in a thesis. When you write your thesis, you have your central proposition, your key finding from the research and the rest of the document is set about backing up what you are pontificating about. We need evidence – hard evidence rather than broad statements about what we think. Nobody cares what we think. In this Era of Cynicism built on a fear of falling for fake news, evidence has become even more vital than in the past. A speech is a similar situation. We have a number of chapters in the speech which are crammed to the gunwales with evidence proving what we are saying is true. Inside these chapters there may be some sub-messages, again providing hard evidence, which when added together validate our one big key message.

The usual problem with messaging though is too many messages. We teach public speaking and we have a tool called the Magic Formula where we provide the context, background, data, proof, evidence, then the call to action and the benefit of that call to action. I notice that our participants are always adding and adding points to bolster the benefit, rather than grabbing the most powerful benefit. The effect is the key message about the benefit is being diluted by what follows. This is the Age of Distraction and when we pile on the detail our audience gets lost and loses interest. We need to make sure the sub-messages are supporting and proving the main message and not competing with it.

This is where pruning a speech becomes very important. We need to ask if we can reduce the content by 10% to see if the message becomes clearer. This is a lot harder than it sounds and I am as guilty as anyone in this regard. What we normally do is keep adding to the speech. We find a great slide and we add that. Then we find another and add that. We keep adding more slides or more messages and we create confusion for our audience. Being forced to chop out 10% is a good discipline to force us to be as clear as possible. This is painful, but it will improve the whole presentation by adding more clarity to what we want people to absorb.

So have one central message and look for a number of ways to get that one message across. If we can do that, then the audience will absorb what we are saying and we can count the talk as a success. Go for quality rather than quantity of messages when presenting.