Asking my audience to help me understand them better
Category:speakingYesterday (Wednesday October 1st) I spoke at the Email Marketing Evolved conference in Stockholm. The organisers Apsis had arranged this event for the third time. It was my first time there and I was accompanied by some great speakers like Jay Baer, Andrew Kordek and Dietmar Dahmen. All brilliant speakers so it was tough to stand out.
I think the conference itself was great. The organisers wanted to connect e-mail more with other digital channels and I believe they succeeded. It was an inspiring day. I’d like to share with you something new I tried out. I asked my audience for help.
My talk
My talk was about Understanding your audience using data driven marketing, a topic I speak about more often and help businesses with in their efforts of trying to understand their customers and audience better.
As a speaker it sometimes can be very difficult to really get a grip on your audience, because they always come from very different backgrounds. So I try to get as close as I can. This can be confusing sometimes, like the day before when I spoke in Istanbul about Netflix. Netflix isn’t available in Turkey. I knew that but spoke about it anyway because it was a very mixed audience from different countries and because the example of Netflix is a really good one for start-ups who are trying to get a grip of their target audience.
But I’ll talk about Turkey another time. First back to Sweden.
At the conference I tried something new. I really want to make an effort to understand my audience so I asked my audience for feedback. The problem with asking for feedback however is that usually they either don’t tell the complete truth or they keep it to the simplest levels: good, medium or bad. This doesn’t really help me understand what they are taking away from my talk.
So I asked the audience for their notes.
Every audience is always making notes. Being on their computer, tablet or on paper. I decided I wanted to see these notes. So I asked the audience to tweet out a picture of their notes after my session.
I knew that this was tricky to do in Sweden, because the audience in Sweden is mostly a little bit more reserved than elsewhere. They are very knowledgeable, but talk less. But the result was great.
I got regular tweets with feedback and feedback in person afterwards, and I got pictures of the notes from some very nice and helpful people in the audience.
What I learned
Looking at the notes helped me figure out a few things about my speech, which will make that I can improve my talks for next times. In some cases it was hard because it wasn’t in English, but here are a few learnings from the notes:
– The message that we need to make a bigger effort to try and understand our audiences came through;
– People really understood the different groups you need to split up your audiences in (Seekers, amplifiers, joiners, buyers);
– People like tricks;
– Stories ‘stick’, I have to make sure the message is very clear;
– The quotes I put on the screen come back in the notes;
– People on average will take away 3-5 things. Don’t put more in;
– The competitor’s data part in the presentation didn’t show up in the notes;
– Social Media platforms like FB-groups, G+ and Linkedin were ignored in the notes.
Some nice learnings there for me. Some I already knew, some refreshing new information as well. I think for me personally it was a success. And somehow (but I haven’t checked that) I think this helped the audience as well, because they will have maybe looked at their notes differently.
I might do this again!
Thank you and a present…
Off course I couldn’t do this without the help of the audience. So first of all I want to thank the audience for their help and in specific the senders of the notes: @camlarsch, @PiaAhti, @LeilaHeijola, @Petra_R, @CarolineSolen, @ailahdus, @ahovrell, @elisinator.
As promised I would thank one of them with a gift, the book of Jay Baer, Youtility.
The one I’d like to give the gift to is Åsa Hovrell (@ahovrell) who tweeted her notes that were made using mind mapping. And I love mind maps, use them all the time, so that’s why she won. Thank you Åsa, get in touch and I’ll send you the gift!
