Tailor Your Presentation to Your Audience

3 min

Every presentation you give is for a specific audience — your manager, your team, the whole company, a customer, etc.

To make your presentation as effective as it can possibly be, you need to tailor it to that audience.

Before you start creating your presentation, understand your audience.

To understand your audience, ask yourself some questions:

What do they know? What don’t they know?

If there’s something you think your audience doesn’t know, include it in your presentation. If there’s something you think they do know, especially if it’s something you’ve talked about a lot before, you probably don’t need to include it.

Some presentations are just about giving information, like project status updates. If you’re doing an informational presentation, you might want to include some things your audience does know, just to cover your bases.

What do they care about?

If you don’t present about what your audience cares about, they’ll tune you out. If you know your audience is curious or excited about something related to your subject, include it. You might even want to lead with it.

Understanding your audience doesn’t just help you write your presentation. It also will help you when you’re delivering it.

For example, we’ve all seen presentations get sidetracked by questions that aren’t relevant to the audience. But if you know your audience well, you can avoid that situation.

Quiz 1 of 1

You’re giving a presentation to an accounting team about why your team needs money for new software. What’s something you should include in the presentation?

a
How the new software will help you manage customer relationships better.
b
How your old software costs your team a lot of time.
c
How much the new software costs.
d
How much other teams will benefit from you getting the new software.

TAKE THE NEXT STEP:

If you’re writing a presentation, take ten minutes to understand your audience.

Tailor Your Presentation to Your Audience
Video Transcript

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