How to Make Public Speaking Effortless: 7 Expert Tips for Confident Communication
Liam Sandford
Liam Sandford is a Head of Marketing, public speaking expert, and 2x Best Selling Author including the book Effortless Public Speaking. He helps ambitious professionals and entrepreneurs communicate with impact to get noticed, grow their career, and build their business.
If your message is not landing, the problem is almost never the quality of your idea. It is that you built the message around what you wanted to say instead of what your audience needed to hear. Resonance happens when someone feels understood. You get there by making the message about them, listening for what they genuinely struggle with, and carrying the point in a story instead of a lecture.
I have spent more than 10 years as a Head of Marketing in B2B SaaS and finance. Making a message resonate with an audience is not a nice idea I read about. It is the thing I get paid to do, every week, and get judged on when it does not work. I have learned a lot about why messages fail to connect and how to fix it.
Resonance Is Not About Being Impressive
Most people try to make a message resonate by being more impressive. More data, more polish, more clever turns of phrase. It rarely works, and I have watched it fail in real time.
Early in my career I would build a campaign or a pitch around everything the product could do. Every feature, every clever detail, every reason I was proud of the work. The response was flat. Not because the audience did not care, but because I had made the whole thing about me and the product, when they were sitting there asking one silent question: what does this do for me?
Resonance is the feeling that you get someone. That you understand their situation well enough to speak directly to it. When that happens, an audience leans in. When it does not, they scroll past, tune out, or nod politely and forget you by lunch. The good news is that resonance is a skill you can build, not a gift some people are born with.
Make Every Message About Your Audience
The first rule of communication is the one everyone knows and almost nobody applies: it is not about you. Even when you are the person speaking, the message belongs to your audience.
Here is the shift that changed my results more than any other. I stopped selling the process and started selling the result. In marketing we call it a simple thing: people buy results, not processes. Nobody wants a drill. They want a hole in the wall. Nobody wants your methodology with its six neat steps. They want the outcome those six steps produce.
Watch how this plays out. A financial adviser can describe their rebalancing process, their risk models, and their quarterly review cycle. Or they can say: you will sleep at night knowing your money is handled. The second version resonates because it speaks to the result the client genuinely wants. The process is real and it matters, but it will never make someone lean in.
So before you write a word, put yourself on the audience's side of the room and ask:
What result do they genuinely want from this?
What problem are they trying to solve today?
How do I make it easier for them to act on what I am saying?
What can I give them that genuinely makes their situation better or simpler?
Then write to one person, not the crowd. I picture a single real customer I have spoken to, name and all, and I talk to them. It sounds small. It changes everything about how the words come out, because you stop broadcasting and start speaking.
The 2 Year Test: Your Past Self Is Your Audience
Empathy sounds soft until you have a method for it. Mine is the 2 Year Test, and I use it before I write almost anything.
Look back at yourself two years ago. What were you struggling with? What did you not understand yet? What would have saved you weeks of frustration if someone had explained it plainly? That version of you is your audience right now. You already know exactly what they need, because you needed it.
This works because you are not guessing at a stranger's problems. You are remembering your own. When I brief a new campaign, I often think about what confused me when I first stepped into a marketing leadership role, because there are people in my audience standing exactly where I stood. Speak to that person and you resonate, because you are speaking from the same seat they are sitting in.
Listen Before You Speak
If you want an audience to connect with you, connect with them first. That starts with listening, and most people are worse at it than they think.
Most of us listen in order to reply. We are half loading our next point while the other person is still talking. The communicators who resonate do the opposite: they give full attention to what an audience is saying, doing, and avoiding. That is how you read the room and adjust in the moment instead of ploughing through a script that stopped fitting five minutes ago.
Keep a Pain Points Database
In marketing I do not rely on memory for this. I keep a running record of what my audience struggles with, pulled from sales calls, support tickets, replies, comments, and the questions that come up again and again. Call it a pain points database. A simple spreadsheet is enough.
The value is in the repetition. Hear a frustration once and note it. Hear it a second time and it is worth a post. Hear it a third time and you build something real around it, because you have found a pattern, not a one off. Over months, this record starts telling you what your audience needs before they say it out loud. That is not a trick. It is just paying attention on purpose and writing it down.
When people feel understood at that level, they stop treating you as someone broadcasting at them and start treating you as someone who gets it. That is the ground resonance grows in.
Say It in Fewer Words
Here is a mistake I see constantly, and one I had to train out of myself: burying the point under context. We explain too much because we are nervous the audience will not get it, and all that explaining is exactly what loses them. Too much context is the killer of attention.
My rule is blunt. If you can say it in five words, do not use 10. Every extra clause is a chance for someone to drift. In marketing, the clearest message almost always beats the cleverest one, because a confused audience never converts. When I cut a landing page headline in half, it usually performs better, not worse.
Try this on your own message. Take your key point and write it in one sentence. If you cannot, you are not clear enough on it yourself yet, and the audience has no chance. Then cut that sentence down again. Whatever survives is your point, and it will resonate.
Carry the Point in a Story
Empathy opens the door. Storytelling makes the message stay after the room empties.
A story turns an abstract point into something someone can feel and see themselves inside. You do not need dramatic material. The best stories are usually the plainest: a small win, a lesson learned the hard way, the moment the penny finally dropped. A before and after story is the most useful shape, because it shows the journey from problem to solution and quietly becomes the audience's potential story, not just yours.
Let me give you a real one, because it is the clearest proof I have that resonance is about timing and audience, not about polish.
I ran a webinar to around 250 people. Everything I have said so far was in play: the whole session was built around what that audience wanted, not what we wanted to sell. Then, instead of saving the ask for the very end where attention had drained away, I put a single poll in the middle, at the point where the audience was most engaged, asking who wanted a demo. That one prompt, placed while attention was at its peak, produced 60 demo requests for the software, directly from the poll during the session itself. Not from a follow up email later. From the moment the message and the ask lined up with where the audience already was.
Sixty demos from 250 people is not normal. It happened because the message resonated and the ask arrived while people were still leaning in. Save your point for the end and you are asking a room that has already started packing up.
Cut the Attention Killers
Once you have your story, protect it. Strip out background nobody needs. Every line should be doing a job, either landing a defining moment or bridging to the next one. Attention is the most valuable currency you deal in, and once you have spent it you rarely get it back. Build the story around emotion, action, and transformation, because that is the part people repeat to someone else later. When your audience retells your point for you, you have resonated.
Actionable Takeaways
Sell the result, not the process. People buy the hole, not the drill. Lead with what changes for them.
Run the 2 Year Test before you write. Your past self is your audience now, so speak from the seat they are sitting in.
Listen on purpose and keep a pain points database. Note it once, post it twice, build on it three times.
Cut your message down twice. If you can say it in five words, do not use 10.
Carry the point in a before and after story, and place your ask while attention is still high, not at the dead end.
Put the audience first, listen deeply, say it plainly, and let a story carry it, and you stop being someone who communicates. You become someone people connect with, trust, and remember. For the full system behind this, read the Ultimate Guide to Public Speaking.
Frequently Asked Questions About Making Your Message Resonate
How is resonance different from just being clear or persuasive?
Clarity and persuasion are inputs. Resonance is the result. You can be perfectly clear and still leave people cold if what you are being clear about does not connect to anything they care about. Resonance is the specific feeling that you understand the person on the other side. Clarity removes friction, persuasion adds motivation, but resonance makes someone feel seen, and that is the part they remember.
How do I make a message resonate when I do not know my audience well yet?
Start with the 2 Year Test and borrow from your own past. If you have solved the problem your audience faces, you were once in their position, so use that memory as your first draft of who they are. Then close the gap with real input fast: read their comments, sit in on a sales or support call, and note the exact words they use for their problem. Their language is the fastest route into their world.
Can a message resonate in writing, or only when speaking live?
It works in both, but the levers differ. Speaking live, you can read reactions and adjust in the moment. In writing, you lose that feedback, so you have to lead with the empathy: nail the audience's exact problem in the opening lines, since there is no room to recover once they click away. The webinar poll I mentioned worked partly because live timing let me place the ask at peak attention, which is harder to replicate on a page, so in writing you compensate with a sharper hook.
How do I know if my message genuinely resonated?
Look for a response that costs the audience something: a reply, a share, a demo request, a specific question that proves they applied it to their own situation. Silence or polite nodding is the tell that it did not land. The strongest signal of all is when someone repeats your point back to you, or to a third person, in their own words. That means it stopped being your message and became theirs, which is the whole goal.
Is it manipulative to build a message entirely around what the audience wants?
No, as long as what you are offering genuinely helps them. Building around the audience is simply refusing to waste their attention on things that only serve you. The line is honesty: sell the real result, not a result you cannot deliver. Resonance built on a promise you keep earns trust. Resonance built on a promise you break burns it, and audiences remember the burn far longer than the pitch.
TL;DR: How to Make Your Audience Resonate With You
Resonance is the feeling that you understand your audience. It is built, not stumbled into.
Frame every message around what your audience wants to achieve, not what you want to say. People buy results, not processes.
Use the 2 Year Test to find real empathy: your past self, two years ago, is your audience now.
Listen before you speak. Track recurring pain points so you know what your audience needs before they tell you.
Say it in fewer words. If you can say it in five words, do not use 10.
Carry the point in a before and after story so the audience can see themselves in it.
More From Liam Sandford
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