A Crash Course in Speaking at Conferences

Out of curiosity, I Googled, “public speaking tips” and the first piece of advice I saw was: “Breathe.” After my eyes rolled out of my head and I plopped them back into their sockets, I started typing this.

This isn’t an “ultimate guide.” This isn’t going to be 5,000 words containing every single thing you need to know about public speaking. This is a crash course. Succinct advice on a bunch of things that you need to know about speaking at conferences. Things that most people wouldn’t even think to advise you on.

First, a few assumptions about you:

You are a subject matter expert in your field
The speaking opportunities you’re going for are generally within your industry
You give a damn about delivering a really, really good talk
Good? Good. We’re going to walk through public speaking from beginning to end: From the moment you apply to or accept your invitation, to the moment you step foot onstage. We’ll cover ideating, staying organized, promoting the event, what to wear, your stage presence, and everything in between. (If you want some food for thought on whether you should pursue paid speaking opportunities, we have some thoughts on that.)

1. Pick your topic.
You mean you didn’t complete that keynote speech before hitting the “Join the call for speakers” button? Kidding. Mostly, I think about my talks like this:

The intersection of what I think is fun, what I’m good at, and what the audience wants. It needs to be fun to hold my attention while I finish building the deck. It needs to be something I’m good at, otherwise why would I be qualified to speak on it? And it definitely needs to be in line with the audience’s goals. If I have no clue what the audience wants, I’m unlikely to accept the speaking invitation.

 How to pick your topic…
Do some research on the event itself, and do some audience research. You’ll probably want to know more about your attendees. Are they typically front-line practitioners who are looking for tactics? Or are they organizational executives who care more about overall strategy? You can ask the event organizers for this, and you can search on social media to look for past tweets and LinkedIn posts from people who talked about the event last year.

You can also use a couple content marketing tools for content inspiration. Find your industry on Feedly for a refresher of some blogs and newsletters to check out. Head over to BuzzSumo to see the current, most popular content in your niche.

And of course, use SparkToro to get an even more detailed picture of your audience — their sources of influence, and the things they’re currently talking about.

The easiest way to do this is to run a search for: “My audience uses these words in their profile: <insert a job title that best represents the conference’s audience>”

Here’s a SparkToro search I ran for people whose profiles include “marketing director”: