How to Market Yourself as a Speaker

No matter how well you speak, if you don’t market yourself well, no one will know about you. I’ve seen some average speakers.  with great marketing talent do extremely well. And I’ve also seen the reverse. Some of the best speakers I’ve ever heard speak are no longer in the business because of their lack of marketing expertise.

Here are some of the key ingredients to marketing yourself as a speaker:

1. Give a Great Speech!

No matter how good your marketing material, if you deliver a poor speech when you get booked, you’re dead! There is nothing more powerful than having people give you a standing ovation for your speech. Get people that enthusiastic about you and your speaking and you’ll have hundreds or thousands of salespeople out there marketing your speaking services for you.

Most great speakers get the bulk of their business from referrals. To get referrals, people have to hear you speak and LIKE what they hear. Speak to enough people and over deliver on your speech and you’ll have people running out there to tell their friends.

2. Have a Great Demo Video

For those who can’t or don’t have the opportunity to see you speak in person, you’ll want to have a video that makes you look as good as possible. Great videos come from making sure that you record on video every speech that you give. You then hire a video professional to take your best material and paste it together to make you look as good as they possibly can.

So, record every speech that you make. Then take all of your footage and have someone who knows what they are doing take it and edit it together to make you look great. Then take the edited footage and put it on a website where people can easily watch it. If they can’t see you in public, the is the second best option.

3. Improve Each Time You Speak

If the most important thing to getting booked to speak is to deliver a great speech then you never want to rest on your laurels. You always want to improve your technique and delivery. You need to have someone to coach you. No matter how good a speaker you are you can always get better. Find someone who will give you honest and direct feedback when you show them your latest video. The last thing you need is someone to pat you on the back and tell you how great you are. This will NOT help
you improve.

Find someone you trust and tell them to BEAT YOU UP when they see your video. Ask them to nitpick. Get them to be as critical as possible. The only thing this will do is help you get better. The only time it won’t is when you take the feedback and criticism personally. There is no time for that if you’re truly interested in being the BEST speaker you can be.

4. Be Different, Be Unique

To get booked to speak you have to be unique. If a movie director is looking to cast a film, you’ll never hear them say: “Get me a Tom Hanks TYPE.” Tom Hanks is unique. There are some other actors who are similar in their relaxed and natural acting style, but Tom Hanks is unique.

When a meeting planner is looking for a speaker for a particular event, you don’t want to be compared with 5 or 6 other “customer service speakers.” If that’s what they ask for, then they are looking for a commodity. And remember, commodities go WAY DOWN in price.

Build a unique approach. Be the Madonna or Prince of your genre. Make your presentations so memorable that they can’t compare you to someone else. Make yourself a category of ONE.

5. Be Visible

Being different and unique is great, but you’ll also have to be seen. Always. All the time. All over the place. You want to be ubiquitous. When your potential client picks up the Wall Street Journal, your name needs to be there. When they turn on the TV, you need to be seen as often as possible. When they are listening to the radio, your name should come up or you should be the interviewee.

The best way to do this is with a book. I’ve got an entire website devoted just to this topic. It’s at www.PublishingABook.com. Take a look when you get a chance. It’s your best tool to help you be more visible.

Do the five things listed above and you’ll be on your way. They aren’t easy, but that’s the roadmap to your speaking success.