Author: Ian McGonnigal

Delivering a compelling executive keynote presentation is a high-stakes endeavor. Whether you’re addressing a roomful of customers, prospects, partners, analysts, shareholders, your own employees, or the press and media, your presentation must captivate, inspire, and drive action. To help you craft a truly impactful keynote, this post will guide you through some best practices in creating an executive keynote presentation that hits the mark.

Know Your Audience

Understanding your audience is the foundation of a successful executive keynote presentation. Research their background, interests, and priorities. Examine what they’re talking about in forums and social media relative to your industry, company, products, and solutions. Tailor your content and language to resonate with their needs and aspirations. By empathizing with their perspective, you’ll be better equipped to deliver a presentation that engages and inspires them.

Review Your Peers and Competitors

Watch their keynote presentations. Note the content, style, delivery, and use of stage. Observe the production quality. Understand how they are using supporting elements like visuals and technology to support their keynote presentations. Where possible, try to gauge audience reactions, either live or by taking a look at any social media reactions. This can give you cues into what works, and what doesn’t. This is the bar. Always strive to do better than this.

Frame the Audience Journey

Where are they starting from? Where do you want them to get to? Design the presentation with this in mind. Every element, everything you say is designed to bring them from point A to point B by the end of the presentation. What message(s) do you want them to remember? What perceptions do you want them to have? What feelings to you want to evoke? What actions do you want them to take? By understanding what you want your audiences to feel, think, know, and do as a result of your words, you’ll be well on your way.

Craft a Clear Message

Define a clear and concise message that encapsulates your thoughts, ideas, and the essence of your presentation. Focus on the main ideas and key takeaways you want your audience to remember. Frame your message around a central theme or compelling narrative that will grab their attention and provide a cohesive structure for your presentation. Be careful of forced connections to a storyline. Make sure it flows organically and authentically.

Structure and Flow

Organize your content in a logical and coherent manner. Begin with a compelling opening that grabs attention and establishes the purpose of your talk. Develop your ideas in a structured and easily digestible manner, using clear transitions between sections. End with a memorable conclusion that reinforces your main message and provides a call to action.

Engaging Visuals

Incorporate visually appealing and relevant visuals to enhance your presentation. Use high-quality images, videos, animations, charts, and graphs to support your key points and convey information effectively. Maintain consistency in style, font choices, and color schemes to create a visually cohesive experience. Remember, visuals should complement your message rather than distract from it. They should not be the focal point. Never, ever read them. Keep it big, beautiful, and simple. Avoid eye charts.

Compelling Storytelling

Storytelling is a powerful tool in executive keynotes. Weave compelling narratives, anecdotes, and examples throughout your presentation to captivate your audience emotionally. Personal stories, industry success stories, or client case studies can be used to illustrate key points, provide credibility, and create a connection with your listeners. Wherever possible, tell stories from the perspective of your audience, or include stories told by others from their point of view. This can be done live or via video interstitials. Make your audience(s) a hero in the story.

Audience Interaction

Encourage audience participation during your keynote presentation. Incorporate interactive elements such as live polls, Q&A sessions, or small group discussions to foster engagement and create a dynamic atmosphere. Tailor your approach to the audience size and setting to ensure a seamless and inclusive experience.

Practice and Rehearse

Rehearsal is crucial for a flawless delivery. Practice your presentation multiple times, paying attention to your timing, pacing, and body language. Know your space on the stage and where you want to be throughout your presentation, and for every major point you want to make. Rehearsing also helps you become comfortable with the content, allowing you to deliver it naturally and confidently. Consider recording yourself to identify areas for improvement and refine your delivery. Also, don’t become overly dependent on the confidence monitor or teleprompter. These should never be read, but used as a tool to remind you where you are in the presentation and where you are going.

Continuous Improvement

Even after delivering a successful executive keynote, strive for continuous improvement. Measure audience response through facial recognition, engagement, surveys, and social media behaviors. Seek feedback from trusted colleagues, mentors, or consultants. Stay updated on the latest presentation trends, techniques, and technologies to ensure your keynotes remain fresh and impactful.

Creating an executive keynote presentation that resonates with your audience requires careful planning, engaging content, and a compelling delivery. By following these best practices, you can craft an impactful presentation that captures attention, inspires action, and leaves a lasting impression. Remember, every executive keynote is an opportunity to influence and drive change, so invest time and effort into honing your skills and delivering presentations that truly make an impact.

Choosing the right events is critical in building an effective portfolio. With the right number, type, frequency, and cadence of events you can accelerate your pipeline and maximize your ROI. In our last post, we talked about the four most important things to consider when selecting an event to sponsor or exhibit in. As you go deeper however, there are several other considerations to take into account.

1. Timing

Does the event fulfill timing requirements? There are 365 days in the year and there are all kinds of reasons why the timing of an event might be right or wrong for your needs. Some of these include:

Pipeline

Understand how the event fits in your pipeline and if the format and experience of the event contributes to your biggest needs at the time. Need more awareness? Need to close more deals? Make sure you have the right experience at the right time.

Other Events

Are there other industry or competitive events that may be attracting similar audiences at the same time? Make sure opportunities for success are not cannibalized. Select the event that has the best chance of success here, or attend both. Maybe pass on both if these is a better opportunity at another point in the year.

Holidays / Time of Year

Does the event take place near a major holiday or holiday weekend? Is the event in the summer during high vacation season? Is the event at the end of a quarter? Consider this before selecting an event that might underperform vs. other potential events for your portfolio.

Other Tactics

What else do you already have planned? Consider the number, frequency, and cadence of tactics within a cycle of similar activities. Don’t spam your target audiences with too many choices to engage with your brand.

2. Location

For in-person Events, is the location viable? Is the location nearby clusters of your target audiences? Is the event taking place in a destination that would be attractive to your customers? Are there multiple events in the same location over the course of the year that might be better leveraged? These questions can help you understand if the location is right for this event at this time.

3. Event Format

Is the event format right for achieving your objectives? In-person events are best for networking, relationship building, and commerce. Virtual events are best for education. Hybrid can have the best of both worlds if executed appropriately. What are you trying to accomplish and is the event format the best way to achieve your objectives? Consider the platform, the delivery, and the engagement.

4. Competitive Participation

Are your peers or competitors participating? You may think this would be an automatic reason to participate. It’s not. Sometimes your competitor may have a different division offering fundamentally different products or solutions than you at the event. Or, the competitor is targeting an entirely different audience, or might even have different objectives. Sometimes it’s good to let competitors waste their money at events rather than you.

Look closely at the number of competitors, and what their participation is / has been in the past. Do they seem successful? Are their objectives, products, and solutions similar to yours? Are they targeting the same audience as you? Are they attracting a viable level of that target audience?

Understanding competitive and peer participation can be a secondary point in your event evaluation.

5. Event Significance

Would this be considered a key, “must-attend” event? Consider industry relevance, analyst, press, and media participation, content, and target audience participation. These are the events to target first.

6. Event Viability

Does the event have “staying power?”, meaning that it has passed the test of time, or has the potential to. Would you consider this a “Tier 1” event? Has it proven that it can retain and grow its audience? Is the social and digital footprint strong? What about the community before, during, and after the event? The more boxes that are checked, the stronger the event is as a contender for your budget dollars.

Producer Credibility

Is the event / producer credible? Often overlooked, producer credibility is an important factor in determining participation. Has the producer consistently delivered a qualified audience? Is the content relevant? Have they attracted marquee speakers? What about data availability and transparency? Do they give you a hard sell, or are they authentically trying to create a valuable event for attendees and sponsors? Also consider ethics in business dealings.

Overall, there are several things to consider when selecting an event to participate in. Unfortunately, it’s not an easy task, but remember, in many cases there are hundreds of thousands, or millions of dollars at stake – Not only in your investment, but in the potential returns. These considerations should help you make the right decisions.
                                            

If you’re starting your forward planning and need to evaluate third-party events, this is this place to start. Whether you’re looking at trade shows, conferences, partner events, in-person, virtual, or hybrid, these key considerations will help you make the right decisions to impact your business. Seasoned event marketers know the worst thing you can do is to just go to the event because you’ve always gone in the past. Leveraging the following criteria, along with a robust event portfolio planning and management process is critical to driving performance and optimization over time. Here are four must-have considerations.

Alignment to Objectives

Ask yourself, “Does this event address an identified business, brand, marketing, or sales objective?” If not. Don’t go. Full stop. You can further consider if the event has some specific strategic value to your company or partner, as well as how the event aligns to awareness, consideration, preference, conversion, loyalty, advocacy, or thought leadership. Also consider whether or not this event is the best way to accomplish your objectives. If there were three events, and you could only choose one, which would the the absolute best. In some cases, an event is not the answer. For example, if you’re trying to drive broad awareness for a product or brand, your budget may generate better impact with digital advertising.

Target Audience(s) in Attendance

Event producers generally do an excellent job promoting their event to exhibitors and sponsors. As part of their promotion, they often talk about the total number of attendees, and the percentage of “Decision Makers”. You might be impressed. It might seem like an amazing opportunity with the tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of people in attendance. Don’t fall for it. Most companies don’t need to talk to everyone at an event. And what is a “decision maker” anyway? You make decisions every day, as do I. In most B2B cases, decisions are made by a fairly complex committee, including, well, just about anyone who touches the product or solution.

Instead, do the math. Know specifically who your target audience is. Review materials provided by the producer. Have conversations with them. Ask them to provide a detailed breakdown of attendees by whatever criteria you’re targeting. Whether its consumer demographics, company firmographics, or business roles, titles, etc., you may find the actual number of the people you care about at the event is much lower than you initially thought. Regardless, use this information to consider how may of this population you will get a chance to engage with, and then what your conversion rates are down the line to forecast cost per contact, lead, qualified lead, and sale. Tis will help you get to a projected ROI pretty quickly and help you decide if the event is the best investment in time and resources.

Past Event Performance

If you’re measuring your events correctly, this should be easy. If not, start. Examine your or your business partners’ past attendance. How’d you do? What were your objectives? Did you achieve them? Look closely at awareness and consideration metrics, as well as demand generation metrics. Don’t forget about expansion metrics for existing customers. Bottom line know your ROI and costs to achieve each objective.

The next thing to understand is diagnostic metrics. Why was the event a success or not? Was it the event? Your content or experience? The promotions on the part of the event producer or yourself? Sales engagement on your team? Competitive disruption? Be honest about what worked and what didn’t before selecting or deselecting the event. It might have been great, but you did not have the right resources or diligence in your approach to be successful. Or ,the event was truly a dog.

Opportunity to Engage

Here’s an interesting one. It ties directly to engineering experiences to achieve your specific event objectives. While sponsorship packages are many, sometimes, the components or tactics available don’t provide the right opportunities to meet your objectives. If you want awareness and thought leadership, speaking opportunities are crucial. If your objective is consideration, you’ll need opportunities to demonstrate your product or solutions, perhaps exhibition space, or workshops for attendees to experience it first-hand. If your customers are in attendance and you need to have intimate conversations, you’ll need meeting space… The list goes on, but matching your objectives to the right opportunities to tell your story in a meaningful and compelling way is critical to your success. If you don’t see experiences you need on the prospectus, or there are elements of the sponsorship you just don’t see the value in, change it up. Negotiate with the event producer. They are almost always willing to provide you with the tools you need to be successful. Remember, there is a cost beyond sponsorship fees – Your cost to create content and experiences to fill these tactics. You can save a lot of money by not leveraging non-value-add elements for your particular situation, and instead negotiating those things that will help you achieve your objectives.

Some other things to consider here include partner integration, either taking advantage of their sponsorship investment or vise-versa, direct access to target audiences and leads, and ensuring your content fits with the content of the event. Additionally, understanding what sponsorship levels your competitors are investing in can help you decide which approach you should take. Brand congruency is important in some cases, in others, not so much. Know your position based on your objectives. Also, Pre-event promotion and post-event content syndication an be extremely valuable in generating longer-term ROI, again depending on your objectives.

There are several criteria you can use to evaluate an event. These are the most critical. By applying these best practices in your event selection process, you’ll be well on your way to building a strong event portfolio to meet your objectives. We’ll explore additional criteria in a future article.