How to Prep a Conference Presentation

Congratulations! You have a speaking gig at a conference coming up. Your only problem? Now you have to prep your presentation for what you hope will be a huge and welcoming audience.

Where do you begin? Hopefully you have identified the topic to speak on and have sketched out your content, but now you need to take some action to prevent your presentation from becoming the snoozefest in the middle of the conference.

Once you've got your structure down, take a look through your deck and make sure you have taken care of a few basics.

Include Your Contact Info

You have to decide how much contact information you want to share with the crowd. But you should make sure to provide them a way to reach you and follow-up after the conference. If you have a Twitter account or Facebook page, share that information so that interested audience members can reach out for additional information. Plug your website. You might give out an email address as well (if you're worried, set up a separate account just for this purpose).

If they do reach out, try to be responsive. Those that contact you are showing true interest in you and what you have to say. Engaging them helps you build your network and grow a list of potential customers as well for your future endeavors.

Vary Your Slides

Nothing is more boring than twenty slides of straight bullet text. Likewise, presentations made of abstract pictures with nothing to do with the content of the speech will, at best, lose half of your audience.

When putting your content together, I would recommend against any slide but an agenda consisting only of text. Instead, you should try to include some sort of visual aid on every slide. Charts, graphs, diagrams, photos, and other visual content should balance out any text or bullet lists on the slide.

Also, try to restrain yourself from overkilling the text on any slide. Even with a visual included, you can still overdo the text elements, creating an eye chart for your audience or a wall of text. Remember, you plan to present content with your voice, not your writing. The slides should be a complement to your voice over, not a replacement.

Tie Into a Theme

Does the conference have a particular theme? Make sure your presentation ties into it. You want your content to slide seamlessly in with the other speakers. 

Your presentation should have a theme as well. Perhaps you can tie it back to your corporate theme. Try to build a connection between the theme of your presentation and the overall theme of the conference. Show how one sits within the other, or supports the idea of the other.

If your particular conference does not have a theme, and instead just brings together speakers in a particular industry group, your presentation should still have a theme. Think about the relevance of the theme in the context of the industry group and adjust your content as necessary to align with their needs.

Get Feedback

Want to know how your audience is going to react to your content? Find a trial audience. Get a friend, family member, or coworker to review whatever you plan to present.

Ask them pointed questions about the content. Is it too dry? Will the audience understand your graphics? Are your jokes funny? What ideas do they have to make it better?

The more feedback you receive, the better. You can choose whether or not to incorporate any of the comments you receive, but having options will give you a better sense of which changes you should consider more important.

Slides Are Reusable, Presentations Are Not

If you have the even greater luck of presenting multiple times at the conference, you should remember this rule. You can reuse some of your slides, but you cannot reuse your presentation.

Of course, this rule would not apply if the conference has been organized in such a way that guarantees you will not see the same audience twice. Some conferences have "tracks." for example, where different subsets of the attendees will view content at different scheduled times.

However, in all other situations, you should make sure you have varying topics with different content for your multiple speeches. In the event you make some fans in your first presentation, those individuals may try to catch one of your other topics. Boring them with the same content a second time may turn them off, just as they were getting to really like what you had to offer.

Obviously, creating a new presentation for each speech avoids any problems for repeat audiences. But if you are speaking multiple times, you might not be able to create enough content to fill every session. If you find it necessary to reuse a slide, go ahead and do so. Audiences will be fine seeing a slide or two that they have seen before, as long as it fits into new content and a new message. Still, try to keep slide reuse less than ten percent or so per presentation.

Use a Timer

Many presentation venues will have timers built into screens that you as the speaker have available to you. But you should always have a method of keeping time yourself. Know the window that you are slated to speak - is it thirty minutes? an hour?

If you use newer versions of Powerpoint, the speaker screen (on the laptop or tablet) will include both your speaker notes and a timer. Don't read, but glancing down from time to time to check your pace will help.

You can also download many free presentation timers. Many allow you to set vibration alerts during your speech to let you know where you are at various checkpoints. Or you can have a full screen timer that you can set up on the floor or podium to be available as a quick reference. Just remember to turn off your other alerts during your speech.

Practice, Practice, Practice

How many times have you practiced your presentation? Not enough. You should know your content inside and out. Know how long that one joke about the last meeting you were in will add to your speech time. Know a longer and shorter version of your same presentation. Be able to cue the embedded video in your presentation in your sleep, making doing it with a wireless click device from a stage in front of thousands seamless.

You may also find practicing in front of an audience equally helpful. Try identifying a few loyal friends or family members that you can persuade to listen and provide normal feedback on your speech and presentation. Try to find some that are similar to the actual audience that you expect to speak to.

Then go practice again.

Add Extra Content with Ejection Points

You cannot very well pad your presentation with fifteen extra slides just in case you get the jitters in front of your audience and blast through your content and need some more at the end. At best, they would seem out of place crammed into the end of your presentation and in the middle of the presentation, they would seem like fluff "filler content" to your audience.

Instead of adding actual slides that you have to click through and skip (which may raise the eyebrows of your audience), you should focus on the content of your presentation. You may be faced with a situation where you have to "fill time" and having these bullet points available can help minimize the impact during that time.

However, you still have to make sure the content stays relevant and really adds additional detail to the content in your base presentation.

This extra content may never see the light of day (or the sound of day since you would be speaking it?), but it can provide you with a comfort buffer so you only have to worry about fitting into the time window, rather than not having enough content.

Your best bet? Glance at that timer and pace yourself.

Conclusion

Your first big speaking event demands a little celebration. But after you take that brief moment to pop the champagne cork and do a little dance, you need to start prepping.

Getting your presentation right can win your audience and even build you a set of contacts that lasts beyond the conference itself. Prepping includes practice, soliciting feedback, making sure you have the right content, and mastering the material. And once you've prepped, the actual presentation should be smooth and easy. And if it's not, you've prepared for that as well.

Got additional thoughts? Join the email list and you can reply back to me directly to start the conversation.
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Key Metrics to Guide Your Online Marketing Efforts

To grow your business, you already know that you have to engage in marketing. So you spend time building campaigns and running ads across various platforms. You write killer content for your content marketing efforts. You hit your social media platforms with targeted posts and ads.

But how well do all of your efforts perform?

You want to just sit back and relax while your lead and sales metrics climb exponentially like the graph above, right?

Without appropriate tracking and metrics, how can you alter your investments to put more effort where it will have the most impact?

Simply put, you can't. You have to track your marketing efforts to understand which ones move you closer to the goals you have for your campaigns. But what types of data should you track?

Lead Generation

When it comes to lead generation, your goal is volume, volume, volume. Which channels send you the most leads? How much are you spending for them? If you are converting leads at a consistent rate, then increasing your overall quantity of leads increases the bottom line proportionally. Even if you don't maintain exact ratios, more leads still means more sales. So here's what you can measure to make sure you are generating the most you can.

Raw Lead Generation by Channel

How many leads are you getting per channel? The raw volume by channel should provide you the first indicator of how you are doing across the various sources of leads. While you might not be able to discern your top performing channel by such a raw number, you can identify the dogs, those channels that send you virtually no leads.

Cost Per Lead

How much are you paying per channel to acquire leads? While certainly conversion metrics come into play in determining where your money generates the most return, you have to understand the amount of money you are paying per lead to make informed decisions about future investments.

Leads Acquired vs. Impressions or Leads Acquired vs. Traffic

This metric helps you understand how successfully your campaign generates leads in a particular target market. Simply put, you measure how many leads you acquire per number of impressions of a particular advertisement. For your content marketing, how many leads are you generating from the traffic to a particular piece of content measured against the total number of visitors to that page?

Leads Acquired by Keyword

Whether you pay for keyword advertising or rely solely on organic search, you should keep track of how many leads you acquire from potential customers by what they were searching for. Knowing what keywords drive your leads can form the basis of new content marketing initiatives as well as even creating new product offerings based on the interests of your potential customers.

Lead Quality

So, you're generating hundreds (thousands? hundreds of thousands?) of leads a month from all of your different sources, but how good are they?

Duplicates

Receiving the same leads from multiple sources? Duplicate leads can obviously skew your overall lead generation metrics. If you can identify the channels sourcing the duplicates, then you may have opportunity to consolidate your efforts and save time and money.

Leads With Multiple Actions (Lead Engagement)

If you have the ability, track leads who take multiple actions displaying interest in your products or services. If you can track those that downloaded a video demo, signed up for the newsletter, and left a comment on a key piece of content on your blog, you may be able to drive similar behaviors in others with modified calls to action. You may also be able to identify those close to conversions and target them with additional actions that fit the pattern of higher converting prospects.

Marketing Qualified Leads

The definition of Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs) will vary from company to company, but as you  refine your own definition of what is a "Sales-ready" lead, you need to track the actions that indicate a potential customer has qualified to be passed directly to sales. 

Hubspot has a great article on lead metrics, including a good set of specific metrics tailored to Marketing Qualified Leads, if you are interested in reading more.

Lead Conversion


Ah, at last, the Holy Grail! Conversion metrics! Finally, you can understand how your leads actually create the types of actions that you set up the campaigns for in the first place.

Are your leads turning into sales? Are you growing your email list? Fortunately, you may find the actual collection of conversions easier than some other metrics, as they result in a desired action (sale, form completion, etc.), and you likely know how many of those actions are taking place.

The real trick is knowing what to do with the information once you have it.

Raw Conversion Rate

For starters, you need to know how many conversions you are getting per channel. Fortunately, many of your analytics packages can provide history of the source of a given conversion simply by setting up your action result pages, such as putting some code on the "transaction complete" page of your sale.

Repeat Conversion Rate

Some channels will send you customers that hit on many of your campaigns. Understanding the combination of actions can help you understand the MQLs generated by each channel and can also help you understand interest and behavior of your potential customer base.

Return on Investment

If you are chasing sales as the premier conversion, tying the value of a sale back to the cost of acquisition for a particular lead helps you determine where to adjust your budgets and where you are getting the highest amount of sales for your spent marketing dollars.

Conclusion

Tracking metrics can only tell you part of the story. Piecing the metrics together can help you put together a cohesive view of your potential customers, their behavior, and what methods work best for you to achieve your desired results.

Once you have that knowledge, you can manage your efforts, both for paid and organic lead acquisition across all of your marketing channels.

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How You Need to React to News of a Merger or Acquisition

I've been in several conversations over the past two weeks given some news that a company where many of my friends work will soon be acquired. I thought that I might be a good idea to put some thoughts down on what to do if you're faced with the news that a merger or acquisition looms in the future for your employer.

After all, change is hard and changing a job situation can be one of the most stressful experiences that a person can endure.

However, staying in the same place won't guarantee you freedom from stress. In fact, this article on CBS News from 2014 reviews survey results showing that forty-two percent of Americans opted for a job change due to workplace stressors.

So what can you do with so much uncertainty?

Don't Panic

First off, don't panic. Any decisions that you could make in a rash panic mode will most likely end worse than the outcome of just sticking around. Instead, you actually need a calm, thought-through plan on how to make it through the transition period.

Set goals.

Are you going to try to weather the storm and survive in the new company? Are you going to look for a new opportunity as soon as you can? Define a strategy for yourself so to guide your actions.

Be realistic about the facts. What information do you actually have about the intentions of the new company? You need to gather as much information as you can to make a decision about your future. Otherwise, you are altering the entire trajectory of your life on speculation.

Prepare for the worst. 

Be realistic about the worst possible outcome that could happen.

Could you be laid off? Could you be without work for six to nine months? What would you need to survive that sort of a transition period?

If you fear these scenarios, you would need some additional cash reserves in the bank account. You may also need to put together a good plan on how you go about finding a new career. Have you ever changed careers before? If so. perhaps this worst case scenario isn't even all that scary. People change jobs all the time.

Take some time to groom your resume, browse your network, and ask yourself honestly about your career goals.

Work Towards the Best

Once you've come to grips with what the worst possible situation might be, then start thinking about what the best opportunity could be. 

Might the new company see you as an asset that they can utilize to help with the transition? Do they have better benefits? Is there even maybe a growth opportunity within the new organization that doesn't exist within your current company?

Think about what concrete steps you could take that would control your destiny and help shape that type of an outcome. Certainly you may not have complete control of this, but it's important to work towards that outcome.

Maybe the best outcome for you actually is to change careers. If so, start taking steps to identify your network, how you can leverage them to identify new job opportunities, and start working to get interviews as soon as you can. 

If you see opportunities or you believe there are opportunities with a new organization, start talking to your peers and supervisors to determine what you can do to help with the transition and position yourself to be visible as the merger or acquisition moves forward.

Conclusion

Change is never easy. People fight against it all the time, because the comfort of the status quo lulls them into a sense of security and routine. 

But sometimes outside forces thrust that change upon us, as is often the case with mergers and acquisitions, when owners make pure financial decisions about the future of a company, affecting its employees in the wake of those decisions. 

All too often, I see employees go into a complete panic and start making rash decisions about the future of their careers without actually stopping to think through rationally what would be the best opportunity. Or, I see people paralyzed by fear, not knowing what to do in the face of such a change. 

As you will usually find, taking appropriate time and creating a plan for yourself serves you best in the long run. Then you just need to start working that plan to achieve the best possible outcome for you in your future.

And if something doesn't appear to be working, just adjust that plan into a new one. Adjustments validate what you have learned and create improvements, they don't scrap the original intentions.

Got other tips I could share with my friends living in the shadow of uncertainty? Drop me a line and let me know. I would love to start a conversation with you.
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