How to Use Public Speaking as a Marketing Growth Channel
Liam Sandford
Liam Sandford is a public speaking coach, marketing leader, and 2x best-selling author, including the book Effortless Public Speaking. He helps introverted professionals and leaders take control of public speaking anxiety and use speaking to market themselves, build influence, and communicate with impact.
Public speaking is often seen as an optional skill for marketers, something nice to have if you want to be recognized in your industry. The reality is that it is one of the most powerful growth channels available to marketers today. Unlike ads or email campaigns, public speaking allows you to build authority, connect directly with your audience, and create long lasting relationships that lead to measurable business outcomes.
When executed strategically, every talk, webinar, or video you produce can be an opportunity to generate leads, grow brand awareness, and establish trust. In this article, we will explore how marketers can use public speaking, social media video, and YouTube as integrated growth tools. You will discover actionable frameworks, step by step guidance, and practical examples to transform your public speaking efforts into a sustainable marketing growth engine.
The Nano Speech Framework: Structure Public Speaking for Maximum Impact
The Nano Speech framework is a simple yet powerful public speaking structure that ensures every talk or video delivers value, engages the audience, and drives action. It is designed to make even complex ideas easy to follow, which is critical when your goal is business growth rather than just entertainment or personal recognition. It follows a simple 3 step process: Open, Body, Close.
Open (Hook)
Begin with a question, statistic, or statement that immediately addresses your audience’s pain points or aspirations. The opening sets the tone and signals why they should pay attention. For example, a talk for SaaS marketers might start with "Did you know 70 percent of new users abandon apps within the first week? What if you could cut that by half in just one month?"
Body (Core Message)
Deliver your main insights, lessons, or practical advice in a clear and structured manner. Focus on being able to deliver your main point in one sentence, and backing it up using stories, examples, or case studies to make your content tangible. For instance, you might illustrate email retention strategies with a real client example, showing how small changes improved conversion rates significantly.
Close (Call to Action)
End with a specific, actionable step that aligns with your marketing goals. This could be a link to a free resource, a consultation request, a newsletter sign up, or an invitation to watch additional content. The key is to make it easy for the audience to take the next step and stay engaged with your brand.
Using the Nano Speech framework allows you to maintain focus and clarity regardless of the format. It works for live presentations, webinars, or even short social media videos. By applying the same structure across multiple channels, you create consistency that strengthens your authority and encourages audience action.
Focus on Your Audience, Not Your Product, Business, or You
Many marketers make the mistake of centering talks around their product or business. This is a mistake in all of your marketing. It’s a harsh reality but nobody cares about you, your business or your product. They only care what it can do for them. To use public speaking as a growth channel, your content must be focused around your audience.
Start by identifying the challenges, questions, and goals of your target market. Create content that addresses these directly. For example, if you are speaking to small business owners, focus on how to implement strategies they can action immediately, rather than detailing the technical capabilities of your product.
When your talks are designed around the audience’s needs:
You establish credibility and trust rather than appearing self-promotional.
You make your content memorable and shareable, increasing its reach organically.
You create opportunities for meaningful engagement, which can later be nurtured into leads and sales.
Audience first content is not a suggestion, it is the foundation of turning public speaking into a measurable marketing growth tool. The more you understand your audience’s pain points and aspirations, the more effective every presentation, video, or webinar becomes.
Public Speaking Is More Than Events
While conferences, webinars, and summits are valuable, public speaking as a growth channel extends far beyond live events. Social media videos allow you to reach audiences who may never attend your talks in person.
People want to do business with humans, not faceless brands. Social videos humanize your business, allowing potential customers to see and hear you, understand your expertise, and begin building trust before they ever become a lead.
Practical tips for social video content:
Repurpose live talks: Cut long presentations into 60–90 second clips that highlight actionable insights or tips. Post these on LinkedIn, Instagram, TikTok, or other platforms relevant to your audience.
Deliver value consistently: Each video should teach, demonstrate, or solve a problem. This positions you as an expert and keeps your audience engaged over time.
Include calls to action: Every piece of content should have a clear next step, but remember that a call to action is not just to download or buy your product. You are rarely going to convert with a heavy sales focus without building trust first.
Creating a social video strategy alongside live events multiplies your impact. Your audience can interact with your brand on multiple touchpoints, deepening engagement and moving prospects through your marketing funnel.
Hitting the Right Audience: Events and Virtual Formats
Choosing the right audience is critical if you want public speaking to serve as a genuine growth channel for your marketing. Not all events deliver the same value, and not all virtual formats create the same level of engagement. The key is to focus on where your ideal audience spends their time and how they prefer to consume content.
Identify the Events That Matter
Even in a digital first world, live events remain a valuable channel. Focus on events that attract your ideal audience. Industry conferences, niche summits, and webinars with engaged participants are more effective than large, generic events.
Assess opportunities by audience relevance, size, and potential for engagement. A 20 minute talk to 50 highly targeted leads often yields better results than a keynote to 1,000 people with minimal alignment. Quality matters more than quantity when public speaking is part of your marketing strategy.
Leverage Virtual and Hybrid Formats
Virtual and hybrid events remove geographical limitations, allowing you to scale reach without traveling. The key to success is creating presentations using the nano speech to be clear, actionable and audience focused. Think about the ‘what is next’ for the audience that is frictionless. A software demo might be too high a commitment, but an e-book downloadable helping them solve a problem might be just right to continue building the relationship.
Virtual events also allow analytics tracking, which helps quantify engagement, monitor retention, and optimize future presentations. This data driven approach ensures that the value of public speaking can be captured to show measurable marketing growth.
Amplifying Your Impact: Turn Talks into Leads and Content
Giving a talk or presentation is just the beginning. To turn public speaking into a true marketing growth channel, you need to extend its reach and influence beyond the room or screen. Every talk is an opportunity to generate leads, create valuable content, and reinforce your authority in your industry. By strategically capturing, repurposing, and promoting your presentations, you can maximize the return on every speaking opportunity and ensure your insights continue to drive engagement and business growth long after the event ends.
Capture Leads Before, During, and After
Every speaking opportunity is a lead generation opportunity. Capture leads at multiple points:
Registration pages: Require sign ups for webinars or event attendance.
Downloads: Offer slides, templates, or guides as incentives. Doing this in the middle of your presentation gives you the best time of getting the information you want from people. At the end, they are ready to leave.
Follow up: Send emails thanking attendees and including links to additional resources.
This multi touch approach ensures your audience engagement translates into tangible marketing results.
Repurpose Talks into Content
A single presentation can generate content for months: social media clips, blog posts, email campaigns, podcasts, and YouTube videos. For example, a 30 minute webinar can become multiple 90 second LinkedIn videos, a blog article series, and a long form YouTube video. Repurposing extends the reach and impact of your content while saving time and effort.
Leverage Social Proof
Testimonials, quotes, and photos from attendees establish credibility and encourage future engagement. Displaying social proof in marketing materials makes it easier to secure future speaking opportunities and builds trust with audiences who have not yet interacted with you.
Measuring Growth: KPIs That Matter
Public speaking is only as valuable as the results it delivers for your business. To ensure your efforts translate into real growth, it is essential to track the right metrics. By identifying and monitoring key performance indicators, you can see which talks, videos, or events generate leads, drive engagement, and ultimately contribute to revenue. Measuring these outcomes allows you to refine your strategy, invest in the opportunities that work best, and demonstrate the tangible impact of public speaking as a marketing channel.
Track Leads and Conversions
Audience size alone does not indicate success. What matters is how many meaningful connections and opportunities your talks generate. Track the number of leads captured during events, webinar sign ups, resource downloads, or follow up inquiries. Then, go a step further by linking these leads to conversions, such as sales, demo requests, or other measurable business outcomes.
For example, if you speak at a virtual conference and 200 people attend, it is far more valuable to know that 50 of them downloaded your guide or requested a consultation than just knowing the total headcount. By tying each speaking opportunity to tangible business results, you can assess ROI, identify which topics resonate most, and prioritize future events or content that drive real growth.
You can use your CRM, marketing automation platforms, and event registration software can help you track these metrics seamlessly. Over time, this data will allow you to optimize your presentations, tailor your calls to action, and make strategic decisions about where to invest your public speaking efforts.
Monitor Engagement
Engagement metrics provide a window into how effectively your content resonates with your audience. Beyond the number of attendees, track interactions such as questions asked during Q&A sessions, comments on social posts, shares of recorded talks, and repeat views of video content. High engagement indicates that your message is memorable, relevant, and compelling.
For instance, a live webinar might have 300 participants, but if 100 of them actively ask questions or comment during the session, it shows deep interest and involvement. Similarly, on platforms like YouTube or LinkedIn, the number of likes, comments, shares, and watch time reveals which topics and formats your audience finds most valuable.
Monitoring engagement not only helps you gauge the immediate impact of your talks but also informs content strategy for future presentations. By identifying which formats, topics, and delivery styles generate the most interaction, you can refine your messaging, create more targeted follow-up content, and amplify the long term effect of every public speaking opportunity.
Harness the Power of YouTube Using Public Speaking
YouTube is more than just a platform for watching videos. It is the second largest search engine in the world and a hub where professionals, decision makers, and future buyers are actively searching for insights. If your target audience spends time there, your brand needs a strong presence.
To use YouTube effectively as a growth channel, you should not treat it solely as a repurposing platform. While repurposing talks, webinars, and social videos is valuable, YouTube content should also be crafted specifically for the platform to maximize engagement and conversions. This is where the Nano Speech framework becomes essential.
Every YouTube video should:
Hook: Start with a compelling question, statistic, or bold statement that immediately grabs attention.
Deliver Value: Provide actionable insights, examples, or strategies that help your audience solve a problem or achieve a goal.
Call to Action: End with a clear next step, such as subscribing, downloading a resource, signing up for a webinar, or visiting your website.
Using the Nano Speech framework ensures your YouTube content captures attention quickly, delivers real value, and drives measurable outcomes. Each video becomes a standalone piece of marketing content designed to attract, educate, and convert your audience.
The advantages of YouTube for public speaking content include:
Longevity: Unlike social posts that disappear quickly, YouTube videos remain discoverable for months or years, continuously attracting new viewers and building authority.
Searchability: Optimized videos can appear in both YouTube and Google search results, giving your brand visibility beyond live events or social media audiences.
Futureproofing: YouTube is where many future decision-makers consume content today. A strong presence ensures your brand is familiar to the people who will shape purchasing and strategic decisions in the years ahead.
By creating content specifically for YouTube using the Nano Speech framework, you turn the platform into an active growth channel. Organize your videos into playlists, optimize titles, descriptions, and tags, and include consistent calls to action. This approach transforms YouTube into a powerful, evergreen marketing asset that consistently nurtures leads and reinforces your authority.
Common Mistakes Marketers Make When Using Public Speaking as a Growth Channel
Even experienced marketers can miss the mark when using public speaking to drive business growth. It is easy to focus on the wrong metrics, deliver content that fails to resonate, or neglect opportunities to capture leads and extend reach. Understanding the most common mistakes allows you to avoid them, refine your approach, and ensure that every talk, webinar, or video you create contributes to measurable marketing results. By learning from these pitfalls, you can maximize the impact of your public speaking efforts and turn each opportunity into a genuine growth channel for your business.
Making It All About the Product, the Business, or the Speaker
Audiences don’t care about your product features, your company history, or your personal achievements. They care about what you can do for them and the problems you can solve. If your talk centers on you rather than your audience, engagement drops and the opportunity for growth is lost. Always start by understanding your audience’s needs and frame your content around the value they will gain.
Scripting Presentations Instead of Using the Nano Speech
Overly scripted presentations often feel stiff and fail to hold attention. Using the Nano Speech framework, with a hook, delivering value, and a call to action, keeps your talk structured, engaging, and memorable. It allows for flexibility, natural delivery, and ensures every segment drives action, making your public speaking a more effective marketing tool.
Making Text Heavy Slides
Slides are not a prompt for the speaker. They are a tool for the audience. Overloading slides with text overwhelms viewers and distracts from your message. Instead, design slides to support key points visually, highlight insights, and guide the audience’s attention. Every element should enhance understanding, not act as a script for you to read.
Not Placing the CTA in the Right Place
Timing is critical for calls to action. Placing the CTA in the middle of your talk, when engagement and attention are at their peak, ensures maximum impact. Waiting until the end risks losing your audience as attention naturally wanes and they may be distracted or ready to leave. Strategically position CTAs where they are most likely to be acted upon.
Choosing the Wrong Speaker
Not every speaker represents your brand effectively. Be intentional about who delivers your content. Consider credibility, engagement skills, and personality. The speaker should embody the brand values and make it easy for the audience to trust and connect with your message. Choosing poorly can undermine the impact of even the strongest content.
Choosing Sales or Marketing to Deliver
It may seem convenient to let sales or marketing teams present, but audiences can tell when content is delivered with a sales agenda. Even subtly, it reduces trust and engagement. Focus on providing value first and consider who can deliver insights authentically, rather than who is easiest for the business to deploy.
Being Unfocused
Every presentation must have a clear purpose. Avoid tangents or trying to cover too many topics at once. Know exactly what you are delivering and why, and structure your talk to reinforce that core message. Focused presentations are easier to follow, more memorable, and more likely to generate measurable growth outcomes.
Opening With an Agenda
Opening with a list of topics or an agenda kills attention. It signals to your audience that they can tune out, because they now know what will be covered. Instead, use the Nano Speech to hook your audience immediately, deliver value, and keep them engaged. Think of every talk as playing the attention game. Start with intrigue and relevance rather than a boring roadmap.limited impact.
TL;DR: How to Use Public Speaking as a Marketing Growth Channel
Public speaking can be one of the most effective growth channels for marketers when used strategically. Key takeaways include:
Focus on your audience, not your product or business.
Use social media videos to humanize your brand and build trust.
Leverage YouTube for discoverability, searchability, and future-proofing.
Apply the Nano Speech framework to structure content and encourage action.
Capture leads, repurpose content, and track KPIs for measurable growth.
More From Liam Sandford
Read my book: Effortless Public Speaking. Learn how to speak confidently, reduce stress, and turn public speaking into your competitive advantage. These actionable public speaking tips will help you improve your presentation skills for any audience.
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