8 Ways to Grow Your Business Leveraging Public Speaking Skills
When it comes to acquiring new customers and growing your small business to the global level, you will find several books in the market, videos on social media, and blogs on the internet providing a plethora of tips. Only a few of them spotlight the power of public speaking! Though public speaking allows business owners to put across their message in front of the right audience, at the right time, in a meaningful and convincing manner, it is touted as the number one fear of all time. The only way to make your business thrive is to confront this fear and push through it.
Mastering the art of public speaking is exceptionally important for startup owners and entrepreneurs to share their ideas, narrate the brand story, and influence the perceptions of the target customers or investors. However, only a few business owners are blessed with natural speaking skills, others have to practice a lot to nail it and leverage its benefits to expand their organizations.
Let’s know more about the benefits that public speaking can bring to your business.
1. Build Trust and Credibility
Good speaking skills portray you as the go-to person, which is very important in the business world to make a difference. The audience trust you more readily if, through your speech, you make them believe that you truly consider their best interests and you are an expert in the subject you are speaking about. In a nutshell, with your outstanding communication, you can attain a privileged position that you can harness to influence people and win their trust in your ideas, opinions, and offerings.
2. Enhance Your Professional Network
Public speaking engagements, such as conferences, seminars, events, workshops, panel discussions, etc., provide you lots of networking opportunities and allow you to make new social connections. You can actively engage in conversation with your audience before, during, and after your speech, seeking a fresh perspective on your ideas and answering their questions. You can also touch base with fellow presenters and learn about new happenings in your industry.
You can provide your mobile number, email, and other contact details on slides and handouts to let the audience get in touch with you in the near future to seek your expertise or know more about your offerings.
3. Establish Yourself as a Thought Leader
Thought leadership has emerged as one of the crucial corporate growth strategies, and public speaking is the best way to establish yourself as a thought leader. Through your speech, you can put forward your innovative ideas to reinvent and reform the industry, share your perspectives about the future, and your aspirations to contribute in more purposeful and meaningful ways through your products and services. To sum up, you can communicate your authenticity and authority by refining your public speaking skills.
4. Increase Brand Reach
Businesses make all possible efforts, such as creating a vlog, blog, website, promotion on social media, etc., to make their brand visible across all channels and media. However, they tend to overlook the traditional yet effective way to give voice, edge, and weight to their brand, i.e., public speaking. To your surprise, speaking gigs render numerous benefits to your brand — building a loyal following of customers, encouraging customers to take action and make better purchasing decisions, growing online traffic, and much more.
5. Save You Precious Time
It takes lots of time to pitch one investor or present to one customer/client at a time. Public speaking makes it possible to pitch/present to all the intended audience under the roof at once. It not only saves you time, but also provides you with the advantage of the law of social proof, which states that people tend to follow what other people do. So, if one or two customers/clients in the conference room will purchase your product, a few others will also make up their minds to do the same.
6. Foster Critical Thinking Skills
Critical thinking is crucial for effective communication. Thus, encouraging the employees to participate in public speaking engagements helps them think critically and efficiently solve problems. They also become capable of collecting relevant information, interpreting data, and making sound conclusions based on that data. Further, they gain expertise in reconstructing one’s belief patterns on the basis of wider experience. All these skills help your employees serve your clients better, which ultimately brings more profit to your business and drives its growth.
7. Improves Ability to do Market Research
As a startup owner or a CEO of an enterprise, whenever you register yourself to speak in a conference or event, you do thorough and meticulous research of your niche and industry to provide new and valuable insights to your audience. This research further helps you identify untapped opportunities and assess competitiveness to penetrate new markets and give your business an edge with well-thought-out strategies.
8. Open Avenues for Increased Sales
Good public speaking skills let you open a two-way conversation with the intended customers/clients and communicate the value that your products/services offer. Through your speech, you can make them feel that you better understand their pain points and can provide the perfect solutions. Further, you can create compelling visual presentations or stories to take them on an emotional ride and make them look at your offerings from a new perspective.
The Inference
Don’t be limited by the fear of public speaking. This skill can be easily learned with practice; so, master it as soon as possible! In fact, while communicating with your friends, families, employees, etc., you don’t realize that you are actually presenting to them. When it comes to getting ahead in the business, you just need to hone your speaking skills. If done right, public speaking can bring you immense business growth opportunities beyond your imagination.
Do you also believe that public speaking is helpful in business growth and gain competitive advantage? If yes, how? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below. And if you like the blog post, do share it on your social media handle.
