Building Confidence In Your Public Relations Pitch
Reach a Wider Audience with Targeted Public Relations
Some folks are just born with confidence. They know from a very young age how to genuinely display self assuredness while guarding against the lack of humility and an inartful ego. For the rest, projecting that confidence is a skill that is honed over a period of time.
Mastering confidence is essential for establishing a positive first impression with your audience; whether that be the community, members of the media, a client or a new acquiantance.
Research shows that the first seven seconds of your interaction are critical in shaping perception.
When making public relations pitches, you need to put across your point and make a connection with someone in less than a minute.
During these few seconds, listeners notice how you engage with them and your body language, voice and demeanor are all influential factors.
That’s why we’ve put together this article on how to build confidence in your PR pitch. It prepares you to present a powerful story that helps your audience understand your brand.
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How To Prepare For A Pitch Meeting To Boost Your Confidence
Here are our tried and true strategies for boosting confidence when preparing for a pitch meeting.
Know Your Audience
Even the most perfectly planned pitches mean nothing if they don’t resonate with your target audience. Knowing your audience is the first step toward successful preparation for a pitch meeting.
Find out who is the best person to present your pitch to so you can determine which direction your presentation should take.
Plan And Prepare
Knowing what comes next during a presentation helps ensure you’re ready for your pitch. Plan your presentation in advance to avoid strategizing on the fly and making costly mistakes.
Call the pitch meeting organizer if possible and ask how much time you’ll have. Then, begin writing your pitch with the most important points first. When you’re done, edit out the least important information to ensure you can cover everything within the allotted time.
Practice
Whether you’re preparing for a pitch or your first acting gig, practicing will help you gain a sense of ease and build your confidence. Believe it or not, practice does make perfect.
When practicing your pitch, give yourself room for failure. Initially, it will take longer to put your point across and you might forget some crucial details. However, failing is natural and allows you to learn, so keep practicing until you achieve perfection.
Craft A Clear And Compelling Story
Storytelling helps you connect with your audience. All stories must have a clear beginning, middle, and end. Creating a clear story helps you attract and maintain the audience’s attention. It also helps your audience identify failures, pain points, and successes.
A clear story helps your brand stand out as a relatable character in various scenarios and establishes it as a must-have solution for your audience. Knowing your audience is pivotal to this part of storytelling as it helps you personalize your story, making it easy for the audience to see how your product or service can help them on their success journey.
Visualize Yourself Making The Presentation
Visualizing your presentation helps you prepare properly for it. Thinking about it as a successful presentation can help build the self-esteem you need. Visualization also helps you practice more as you imagine every presentation step.
To visualize positively, begin by deciding what you want to achieve. Then, picture the scene and visualize each step towards a successful presentation.
Set Manageable Goals
Setting goals helps you determine what you want your pitch to help you achieve and lets you concentrate all your efforts on achieving this outcome. That said, setting unrealistically big goals might demotivate you and lead to procrastination because there’s so much to do.
Short to mid-term goals help you feel a sense of accomplishment whenever you accomplish what you’ve planned to do. An example of a short-term goal before pitching is successfully practicing your pitch daily.
Getting a sense of accomplishment for short-term goals is an excellent self-esteem booster that will have you feeling confident before your presentation.
Look Confident During The Presentation
Appearing confident and competent on the outside greatly helps a presentation. Here’s how to look confident on the day of your pitch:
- Make eye contact: Making eye contact lets your audience scan your eyes for information, keeps them engaged, and helps you build a rapport with them.
- Use gestures: Reinforcing your points with gestures makes you more persuasive, increasing your chances of presenting a winning pitch.
- Eliminate filler words: Filler words like ‘um’ make it take longer to put your point across and make you sound less confident.
Final Thoughts
Crafting and delivering a perfect pitch is a skill that some PR professionals take years to master. If you have a pitch meeting coming up, use the tips shared in this article to build confidence and deliver a winning pitch.
Remember that self confidence isn’t something you can fake. It takes time to genuinely build, so be patient and kind to yourself. Also, at the end of a successful pitch, pat yourself on the back and remember that moment in your next public speaking event.
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