I looked up at the audience to see them on their phones or staring at the ceiling and one of them doing some emails. They were bored. I had lost them.

I knew why.

I was reading them a list of bullet points from a screen. I hadn’t put the effort into the one thing I always put effort into, because, I was supply teaching, standing in for someone else.

I had fallen into the biggest trap by mistake. I had forgotten the golden rule about engaging the audience.

Content FIRST. Platform second.

When it comes to marketing or speaking, or spreading a message to anyone, or any form of communication, it’s easy to become obsessed with the platform.

You feel the pressure of standing on the stage, or you get thinking about which platforms people will see your ad on… but it’s the CONTENT that comes first.

Sounds obvious right? well, It’s not! Because it even took broadcast media quite a while to suss it out too.

About fifteen years ago I was in the depths of working in Radio. Radio: the traditional broadcast medium where we put content together, blasted it out through speakers and people listened – there was no other choice. Audience engagement was pretty easy.

At the time we were starting to rethink how Radio was working. Twitter and Facebook were starting to grow, and we were aware that youtube was starting to be a place people went for information. We sat in a room and decided that it had to evolve and we came up with the idea that we should put the brand of the Radio Station in the middle, and then engage with our audience on as many platforms as possible.

This approach worked. This approach stuck.

So if you are ever sat in a meeting where someone says “we just need to do some facebook ads” or “we should get some videos on youtube” they are platform gazing, rather than focusing on the content.

For content to engage with your audience you need to go through the following 3 steps:

1) What is your point? (Also, what do you want to get out of it?)

2) What do you want your audience to remember, and feel?

3) Who are you talking to? Where are they, and what are they needing?

It is only when you’re at that third point do you begin to work out what platform will work best and how you tweak it to the platform.

My mistake was to try and deliver someone else’s content without thinking “what is MY point?” or what did I want them to remember? I was just worried that the powerpoint slides made sense. And because of that – I lost the audience.

Never again!

If you are communicating in any way: Content First, Platform Second.