The basis of any great speech or presentation is your content. In order to structure your content effectively for maximum impact, you need to know the main purpose of your speech. Is your purpose to persuade? Is your purpose to inform? Is your purpose to inspire? Is your purpose to motivate? Or is your purpose to entertain? Your purpose will be your guiding principle throughout your speech. Although during your speech you may be doing several things such as persuading and entertaining, your speech will be more effective if you focus in on one main purpose.

In other words, what exactly do you want to communicate to your audience? Making sure that you have a clear purpose ensures that your core message (and call to action) will ultimately resonate with your audience. Again the purpose of a speech broadly speaking can be to: persuade, inform, inspire, motivate or entertain. Let’s look at each of these individually.

Persuasion
If you are being persuasive, you are convincing your audience members to either adopt a position that you hold or change their minds (and hearts) to another point of view. For example, if I am environmentalist, my purpose might be to persuade my audience that global warming is real. I might demonstrate the evidence by presenting research, facts and statistics that show the increase in temperature over the last decade.

Inform
If you are informing your audience about a topic, it means that you are relaying pertinent information. For example, if you are a scientist, you may be conveying the results of your research on an experiment that you conducted. You are in a straightforward manner explaining the results of your research. Depending on the type of research that you conducted, you might also be persuading the audience to adopt your research findings. Most likely, your primary purpose would be to inform.

Inspiration
If your purpose is to inspire your audience, you are interested in helping people to see and feel that new opportunities and transformation are possible for their lives. For example, if a speaker in his seventies took up writing and was successful at it, his speech purpose could be to inspire people that you can have writing success at any age.

Motivation
If your speech purpose is to motivate your audience to action, that would mean that you are encouraging your audience members to have a transformational shift in their mindset. You are motivating them by encouraging them to inspired action for a specific reason. For example, a personal trainer who was once very overweight might deliver a speech with the purpose of motivating the audience members to get fit for health reasons.

Entertainment
If your purpose is to entertain your audience members you want them to be entertained and enjoy themselves when you deliver your speech. For example, if you were to deliver an after dinner talk your purpose would be to entertain and you would include humour because people love to laugh especially after having a good meal.

In order to define what the purpose of your speech is, being able to describe it in one sentence is ideal. Clearly defining your purpose, will help you stay focused when you write and deliver your presentations. If you are unable to clearly define your purpose, take some time and reflect on what you ideally would like to communicate to your audience and the message that you want to convey. Defining your purpose will help you to connect with your audience and ensure that your message is delivered with maximum impact!

If you obtained value from this post, please comment and share.