Lesson 1 Criteria for Success

Before the Event

Understand Your Audience

Let’s assume that you are a successful entrepreneur giving a talk at a university. If your audience is a group of sophomore students who know nothing about startups, you may not want to talk about how to raise funds with venture capitalists. Similarly, you may not need to explain the definition of ‘Minimum Viable Product’ to an audience from an entrepreneurship center at the university.
It’s important to always research the audience of the event however you can, and use the information (industry, demographics, interests, backgrounds, etc) to tailor your talk and visual aid.
How do I learn about my audience?
Ask the event organizer for attendee demographics and any other information they are able to share. If you have access to audience engagement tools, search the attendee profiles by keywords or industry for a more comprehensive view. With Whova, speakers can even see exactly which attendees will be going to their talks!

Start Interacting with Attendees Early on

Make some interactions with attendees at the conference before your speaking time. This will help you understand your audience, get people more interested in your talk, and also build your professional network. The audience will be more engaged if they know the person who is speaking, and they may even encourage their friends to attend your session.
How can I interact with the attendees?
See if the event has a central communication place like a public bulletin board or group either in social media, the event website, or their audience engagement tools. Some audience engagement apps are ideal for this. 
For example, in Whova’s Community Board, any event participants can create a custom conversation topic or initiate social gatherings. There, you can start a relevant discussion to your session and encourage attendees to post questions. Taking it one step further, you can organize a post-session meetup or coffee chat. 

Promote Your Talk via Social Media

Start to create buzz on social media before an event. This can build your standing as an industry expert, and may even help you arrange for engagements at other events or get career opportunities in the future. If attendees look you up beforehand, they’ll be able to learn more about your involvement with the event. Not to mention the event organizers will be appreciative that you helped spread the word. 
What is an effective way to promote my session on social media?
Start with a tweet about your upcoming speaking engagement with a link to the event website, ideally the speaker webpage with your session and bio. To visually engage people, add your photo, event logo, or an image related to your session topic. Some event websites or audience engagement apps provide a social sharing button that makes it easy to post your session in a beautiful design, so don’t miss out on this kind of feature. 

Share Interesting Articles 

To engage the audience before the event begins, share interesting articles about the industry or topic you’ll be covering. You can also share a short video, news, controversial discussions, blogs, publications, or some of your other achievements. These will give the audience some background information on you or the topic of your speech and may get more people interested in your talk. 
How can I share interesting articles with the audience?
You would need to know how to reach your audience. It can be a good idea to include a few web links into your session abstract or post on social media with an event hashtag. But if your event app has a feature like the Community Board or Article Sharing, that will be the perfect place. Attendees will enjoy reading your articles while traveling to an event venue or during a coffee break so they can get ready to participate in your session.