How About Your Core Message? Simplicity And Impact In Speeches And Presentations.
Have a key message
Focus on the core of your speech: The key message
Key or core messages create focus, control, and intensity in influencing your target audiences. How to create compelling key messages in speeches and presentations.
Overview
The focus in speeches and presentations
In speeches and presentations, it happens often. One exciting idea, then another, and another and another… Pretty soon, the audience is more or less confused. It’s important to remember that your audiences have short attention spans. We all do. Your messages need to cut through all the noise.
Many public speakers forget to choose carefully the big point, the core message — the heart, soul, and center — of their speech.
With a core message, your messages will stay on track and make sure you’re communicating the right thing to the right people.
Simplicity and response
Simplicity and response are qualities that measure the true value of any work of art.
Frank Lloyd Wright
This is also true for a good speech. Making a presentation simple requires more thinking than just talking around. You might be concerned that in your quest to make your presentation simple, you’ll dumb it down. Yes, simplicity is a complex undertaking. You cannot reach simplicity without understanding the complexity and subtleties of your topic.
Your job is to make the complex easily graspable to your audience by arriving at that simplicity. Therefore, you have to know your audience well enough to craft a presentation that clearly and effectively helps make their lives better in a way that matters to them. So you need to know what your audience desires and connect that with your expertise, as a starting place.
The core message of your speech
The core of your idea is the core of your presentation. Express that core in one simple and specific sentence, as the core message.
Step by step:
1. Know your audience
Do a thorough audience analysis so you’re intimately connected with what this audience needs and desires.
2. Sync
Look for the areas within those audience needs and desires that sync up with your rooftop message. How can you genuinely and significantly help your audience with your expertise?
3. Voilà; the core message
Craft a core message as a promise. Have a core message that solves a problem your audience care about, and build your presentation around that promise.
Make sure that the core message focus on your audience instead of yourself.
So what?
Strive to make sure your key points and especially your core message truly sink in, and avoid anything that doesn’t directly support those key messages.
A good core message…
- … is clear, concise, compelling, with a strong call to action.
- … concentrates on the core.
- … is short and focused.
Preparation of important speeches and presentations
Those who do not speak are not heard, and even those who speak up are not always successful. There are a few more steps that need to be mastered.
Do you want to convince with your message and also as a personality? Then I will help you to prepare your speeches and presentations. You determine the scope. At least, I recommend a test run with professional feedback for you and your message. Then you will know how you and your content are perceived, what you should do, and what you should leave out, where there is potential. Why do you want to get such helpful feedback so late after your real performance? Then it is too late for adjustments. Benefit from the advantage. My definition of luck: Preparation meets opportunity.
You can best estimate for yourself where the effort is worthwhile concerning the expected benefit. Here you will find the fees for my support (communication, psychology, language, structure, voice, body language, storytelling, rhetorical means, media such as PowerPoint and Co., etc.)
You are not in Berlin right now? Then choose meetings with me via telephone or video support. Whereby, there are quite good reasons for a trip to Berlin.
By the way, many people suffer from such intense stage fright in front of an audience, and therefore their performance lags behind their possibilities. Too bad, because with my help performance in a good condition is possible. Just in case...
A good start: Professional feedback with suggestions for improvement
How persuasive are you and your messages in speeches and presentations? How good are you at the 111+ most important presentation skills? I have been analyzing speeches since 1998. After evaluating 14,375 speeches and presentations, and numerous mistakes of my own, most of which I only discovered after a delay, I can tell you exactly what works with which audience. Let me give you the feedback that will help you get ahead. You will receive essential feedback and recommendations, as well as the impulses you need to persuade your audience in concrete situations.
Are you interested? If so, here is how to get helpful feedback with recommendations for improving your speeches and presentations.
Just ask me personally
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This article is a short excerpt from the more comprehensive course materials my clients receive in a group or individual training or coaching.
Published: March 9, 2010
Author: Karsten Noack
Revision: August 20th, 2023
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