When Guyana's President, Dr. Mohamed Irfaan Ali, took the stage at the Offshore Technology Conference (OTC) in Houston earlier this summer, spare him a moment of sympathy before you judge him. His country sits on one of the most significant offshore oil discoveries in decades, closing in on a million barrels a day. That should make him a straightforward hero at an industry conference…had he matched his speech message to his audience.
Matching Your Speech Content and Tone Against the Expectations of Your Conference Audience
But Guyana is also a developing nation that depends on international financing institutions — bodies that have spent the last decade attaching sustainability conditions to their money and lecturing smaller economies about their carbon footprint, even as those economies are trying to bring electricity to homes that don't yet have it.
Match Your Speech Message. Even Out the Agendas
So Dr. Ali is caught. Speak too enthusiastically about oil at OTC and risk a frosty reception from the United Nations (UN) apparatchiks back home. Speak too much about energy transition and renewables, and you've wasted a room full of oil and gas professionals who came specifically to hear about Guyana's extraordinary production story. By most accounts, his hour-long keynote — ranging across renewable energy systems, rare earth minerals, development financing, and something he called "global energy balance" — fell between two stools. He wasn't wrong. He just hadn't solved the harder problem of which audience he was actually speaking to. Here are five ways to avoid the same fate.
Top Tips to Match Your Speech Message
Tip 1: Know Who's in the Seats
Before you write a single word, ask yourself: who exactly is going to be listening? At a specialist industry conference, your audience has self-selected. They're there because of a shared professional interest — and they expect your remarks to speak to that interest. Dr. Ali's energy transition themes would have landed well at a UN financing summit or a climate investment forum. At OTC, they felt off-frequency.
Tip 2: Lead with what They Came for
If there's an obvious reason the organisers invited you, address it early. Dr. Ali's country is a genuine oil-industry success story — Yellowtail onstream, the Uaru field coming next, a trajectory toward a million barrels a day. That's a story this audience would have leaned in for. Lead with your strongest, most relevant material. Don't bury it or treat it as a footnote.
Tip 3: earn the right to broaden
There's nothing wrong with covering wider territory in a keynote — but you have to earn that right by first satisfying the room's core expectations. Give the audience what they came for, then widen the lens. Had Dr. Ali spent the first half of his speech on Guyana's hydrocarbon achievements before pivoting to the financing and transition arguments, those broader themes would have felt like a natural extension rather than a detour.
Tip 4: Find one clear thread
A keynote that touches on renewables, rare earth mining, development financing, electrical grid infrastructure, and global energy equity is covering a lot of ground. That breadth isn't necessarily a problem — but it needs a single organising idea to hold it together. If you're going to roam across topics, give your audience a map. One clear concept, stated early and returned to throughout, stops a wide-ranging speech from feeling like a ramble.
Tip 5: test your message in advance
The simplest check of all: describe your planned speech in two sentences to a colleague who knows the conference. If they look puzzled, or if their two sentences back to you sound very different from yours, something needs tightening. Better to discover the mismatch in a corridor than on stage in front of a thousand people.
A mismatched message isn't usually the result of bad ideas — and in Dr. Ali's case it certainly wasn't. It's the result of trying to serve too many masters at once without a clear plan for doing so. Know your room. The other audiences can wait.
Succeed when You Match Your Speech Message to Your Conference Audience
Know your audience is an often-repeated mantra. And we repeat it because it's key to a successful conference speech. Particularly so when you need to match your speech message against your audience's expectations. In summary:
- 1Know exactly who's in the seats before you write a word.
- 2Lead with the material your audience came specifically to hear.
- 3Earn the right to broaden by satisfying core expectations first.
- 4Give wide-ranging content a single clear thread to run through it.
- 5Test your message on a colleague before you take the stage.
For more public speaking and presentation tips, you'll find our full series here. And when you're ready to sharpen your own public speaking skills, please don't hesitate to get in touch.
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