Start with a precise idea of your persuasive speech's objective. Your call to action. What do you want your target market to do as a outcome of your speech. Summarize it into a single statement. Keep this in mind throughout.
Draft a preliminary call to action, specifically asking your audience to do what you want them to do. Be precise as to what the next step you want them to take is. Is it to buy your product, or perhaps to test drive it, or maybe just to begin the process of considering your solution.
Organize three solid rationales why they should do what you want. Start by 6-10 good reasons. Group those that are closely related into the three main concepts, and then rank them according to their relative power.
You now know where you want your target market to go and why from your view.
Now pause and think more thoughtfully about your customers. Who are they? Are they the decision makers? Or support staff? Are they capable of making a judgment to buy on the spot, or is there a process that will be required. Consider their age, gender, geographical distribution and any other circumstances that will influence the way they hear what you have to say.
You've already identified what you have to say, the purpose here is to understand how best to say it, so your target market hears what you have to say. You may arrange the significance of your arguments one way, they may another. If there is a distinction, consider re-ranking yours.
Now for each chief point on your list, come up with an anecdote or story to depict how or why this would be important to your target market. These stories will become the body of your persuasive speech. When you have three good stories, one for each influential point you need to consider how to link them together. How to shift from one idea to the next.
Finally, now that you have a series of three stories, each of which illuminate one of the key reasons why your audience should act positively on your call to action, you need to come up with an introduction.
This is like an appetizer to get them engaged in what you are about to say. Asking them a pertinent question, or making a audacious statement designed to grab their attention are just two potential ways of achieving this. The introduction should be comparatively brief. You want to seize their attentiveness, and give them a quick overview of what you are going to tell them.
You now have your draft persuasive speech. Finally you want to memorize your introduction and your call to action. You want these to be down pat. Don't memorize the body of your speech. Instead, remember the stories you are going to share and the transitions you are going to use to march from one to the next. This will give your persuasive speech a realistic march and alleviate you from anxiety about memorizing exact choice of words.
Draft your first draft in 30 minutes. Practice it out loud and or in your head a dozen times. Each time, you will alter it trying to convert your ideas into language your audience will hear and recognize. Do this and your persuasive speech will know their socks off.
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