Too often, we can find ourselves rambling or roaming in a presentation, and this usually means we’ve strayed from the hoary principle of audience focus.

Yes, focus on your audience.

Roaming aimlessly means that we haven’t established a tightly focused subject, and we’ve not linked it to a tightly focused conception of your audience.

Without tight focus on your subject, you can’t help the audience to visualize your topic or its main points with concrete details.  Without details in your message, you lose the attention of the audience.

So how do you include meaningful details in your presentation, the right details?  Audience focus.

The Devil’s in the Details

By reversing the process and visualizing the audience in detail.

This is akin to the branding process in the marketing world.

Your brand must stand for something in the customer’s mind.  And, conversely, you must be able to visualize the customer in your own mind.

If you can’t visualize the kind of person who desperately wants to hear your message, then you haven’t focused your talk enough.

Go back and retool your message – sharpen and hone it.

Think of the various consumers of products and services such as Ben and Jerry’s ice cream, Whole Foods Market, Mercedes Benz, Pabst Blue Ribbon.  Can you actually visualize the customers for these products, picture them in your mind in great detail?

Likewise, can you clearly visualize the consumers for Greenpeace, the National Rifle Association, a Classic 70s Rock radio station?

Sure you can – you immediately imagine the archetype of the customer base for each of these.

Focus on Your Audience

Now, in the same way, can you visualize the consumers of Chevrolet?  Tide?  Folgers?  United Way?  The American Red Cross?

Of course you can’t, because these brands have lost focus.  The message is too broad.

The lesson here is to focus your message on a tightly circumscribed audience type.

Who is in your audience, and what do they want from you?

Prepare your talk with your audience at the forefront.  Visualize a specific person in your audience, and speak to that person.

Make that person the hero.

Talk directly to that person.

The upshot is a tightly focused message with key details that interest an audience that you have correctly analyzed and visualized.  You speak directly to audience needs in a way that they clearly understand and that motivates them.

Craft your message in this way, and you’ll be on-target every time to develop a powerful personal competitive advantage.

Find more secrets of especially powerful presenting in The Complete Guide to Business School Presenting.