All presentations need structure and the type of format you choose should be directly linked to your objective. If your goal is persuade an audience to accept and idea or to buy a product then why not try AIDA. This is a simple, yet powerful sequence of persuasion developed by advertising executives in the 1930’s. However, it still works today and public speakers can easily adopt and adapt it for persuasive presentations.

You simply structure your presentation or speech around four key areas:

Attention
Make sure you get the attention of your audience. Clearly a powerful, compelling introduction is key. Use something that grabs the audience and makes them want to know more. A startling statistic; a testimonial or a rhetorical question all work well.

Interest
Give them more information to get them interested in what you have to sell them. Go into more depth about what ever it is you are speaking about.

Desire
Now you need to make them want what it is you are selling. You need to express your product or service in terms of what it will do for the audience. Sell benefits not features – as the old saying goes - sell the sizzle not the sausage.

Action
Make sure you conclude with a call to action. What do you want your audience to do next? Do you want them to leave business cards to request a visit? Visit your website?
 
AIDA might be a simple structure, but it has proved its worth over the last seventy years. Try following this simple format to add structure to your persuasive presentations.

This entry was posted on Friday, November 2nd, 2007 at 8:38 pm and is filed under Preparation, Fear of Public Speaking, Structure, Persausion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.