You’ve done the hard work of securing a keynote or guest speaker for your upcoming event. Celebrity, professor, author, or industry leader, there is no shortage of options when it comes to finding the perfect fit for both your topic and your budget.
Guest speakers are a big draw and potentially a big part of your event budget whether it’s a conference, an internal all-company meeting, a sales kick-off, or an intimate, in-person gathering of clients or prospects.
Of course, the overall objective of most events is to drive attendance and optimize the ROI, but including guest speakers can help spark action or inspire change from attendees. The addition of a guest speaker also adds another layer to your event: reinforcing the intended message and potentially offering a long-term impact.
Below are three tips on getting the most value from a keynote or guest speaker at your next event.
It’s unrealistic to request radical changes to a speaker's content for a single event. Don’t ask your guest to customize their message for you, instead, focus on personalizing their content to ensure it aligns with your event messaging.
Personalization helps your attendees see themselves in the shared content. It is more scaleable for the presenter and the message resonates better because people tend to increase both the breadth and depth of their learning when the content shared is both relevant and timely for the attendees.
People are inherently looking to connect to their needs, and as an event marketer, it falls to you to make this as simple as possible for your audience.
Using short, simple questions on a screen or prompts at the start of a gathering serves to make the material more personal. Some examples:
In some situations, when a person in a leadership role responds first, it can add another level of personalization and/or resonance to the message. When leadership shares honest feedback first, it encourages the other attendees to do the same.
Another idea is to create what I call “after shows.” Here, small, curated groups do a deeper dive into the material at the end of our following session. Open conversation vs. a cookie cutter Q&A personalizes and reinforces the presented ideas for everyone individually, on the level they choose.
Typical keynotes put the audience in the passenger seat, passively listening to content that was pre-determined without their input. People are more committed to what they help create versus simply consuming previously created content. To boost ownership:
Educator and scholar John Dewey said it best, “We do not learn from experience. We learn from reflecting on experience.”
Keynotes alone don’t necessarily lead to learning - it’s the reflection and processing of the shared content that inspires learning. We often pump our events so full of content that we leave little space or time for reflection. Without that reflection, there is even less opportunity for the audience to apply that newly gained information post-event.
Engage attendees by asking them to share their ah-ha moments or key takeaways via a post-event form, or – even more powerfully– with a partner or a small group as mentioned previously. So much additional learning comes from sharing different perspectives and relevant experiences.
These types of small group conversations and live feedback can be incorporated during a pause in the keynote itself, particularly following a complex or content-heavy topic.
In addition to reflection, consider application as well. For example, asking questions such as:
Will anything we’ve learned together change how we operate moving forward?
How will we work differently together as a result of these insights? Have we identified any obstacles that need to be overcome?
The difference between an event that informs versus one that engages is often due to not actively engaging the audience or inviting them to share their thoughts and reflect on the new information that’s been shared. Without ample time built in to allow attendees to process dense material or share ideas and feedback, they are far less likely to retain the content as their own, store it in their memory, or apply it in their lives.
Though we may bring in a guest speaker for their message or personality, it's the attendees who need to carry the ideas forward. To help them succeed as well as increase the ROI of the event, we should personalize the content of speakers and give the audience both ownership of how they connect to and experience the content as well as opportunities for reflection and application.
When we are a part of a transformational event, it’s rarely due to the content alone. It’s the individual relationship we form with the content that fuels the connections that ensure an event stays with us long after the closing remarks.
