Ten Secrets to Building Audience Engagement
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Ten secrets to building audience engagement #1
There is a saying that “enthusiasm is contagious.” And it is so true. If you are enthusiastic about your subject then your audience will be too. Behave this way and you create the impression that the subject is worth talking about, worth learning and worth sharing. And if it is worth talking about, worth learning and worth sharing, then your audience will be engaged, doing just that – learning and remembering and repeating what you shared.
If you speak with confidence, you give the impression of being authentic and sincere. Confidence gives the impression that you know your content, and that you are confident to share it. An audience is far more likely to engage with someone who knows what they are talking about and is confident that it will be useful and worth sharing.
Speaking with energy shows your passion for the subject and for your opportunity to share that passion and the information.
You will need to manage that energy, though. It does not mean presenting for the whole time with high energy. You will need to go into the speech at the energy level of the audience or you will seem strange, seem to be outside their circle, their experience. You can build the energy, or tone it down to suit. Try to avoid speaking quickly and excitedly the whole time. It will get boring and will be wasted just as much as speaking in a monotone will. Keep the power by using pauses, by using deliberately slow speech and by creating down time. They work just as powerfully as speaking quickly and with excitement.
Passion creates engagement.
Speak with confidence, energy and enthusiasm.
Ten secrets to building audience engagement #2
Ask for participation, or ask questions.
Questions encourage thinking as well as listening, and a reinforcement of engagement.
Ask questions that people can respond to physically such as ones that begin with “How many of you …? Get people to raise their hands – high. And ask the opposite as well, so you are getting them to think, to attend and introducing a change of state – a powerful combination of techniques to keep attention and engagement.
Ask people to discuss a point with a neighbour, or a group.
Ask for their choice of agenda for the presentation.
Participation creates engagement.
Ask for involvement.
Ten secrets to building audience engagement #3
The engagement you are making with your audience is, for the most part, verbal on your part and nonverbal on their part.
So you will need to watch for their nonverbal level of engagement.
Use this scanning time to also make eye contact with each member of the audience. Be present. This is a conversation. So make the audience feel you are talking to them, not just presenting your material.
It also builds your authenticity, since one of the main signs of a person who is not authentic – not sincere - is lack of eye contact. And if there is any feeling in the audience that you are not being authentic, then the engagement will be whittled away.
If you use notes, use them sparingly, or they will diminish your eye contact. If you must look at the projection screen, look briefly, or that, too, will diminish your eye contact. Any time that you look away from the audience make it a choice, make it deliberate, to support the point you are making.
Maintaining the engagement.
Ten secrets to building audience engagement #4
If you are telling a story about Jim, for example, tell your audience something about him. Describe him and how he looked, or how he walked or spoke, or even how he smelt, if necessary. Take this opportunity to describe what is important to the story. If you want him to be seen as menacing, describe, perhaps his biker jacket and tattoos, or the threat in his stance or voice. Describe enough to make him fit into the story, but not more. If your audience is to take ownership of the thing you are describing, they need to fill in details for themselves. So while Jim may look differently to someone in the audience from how you envisioned him, and from the person sitting next to them, so long as the description reinforces his role in the story, the description will have worked.
To make something stay in the audience’s memory you can use several senses to describe something and make it more vivid. I mentioned describing how the character smelled because this may be important. For example if he has just come from a rough bar, he may smell of stale beer.
The more vivid the description, the more the audience will be drawn into the scenario you are creating and the more chance they will have a picture to remember.
Vivid description.
Ten secrets to building audience engagement #5
Maya Angelou is quoted as saying “I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” When you make an emotional connection, you open up the pathways in your audience’s brains that facilitate recall. Whatever you associate with that emotion will be retained along with the emotion, in their memories.
Having already researched your audience, you should have some idea of what excites them, what they cry about, what their problems are. And you can use that information to connect to their emotions.
Use examples that will push those buttons, appeal to what matters to them most.
Tell stories that create an emotion.
Use words that heighten emotion. Use emotive verbs. Rather than “she said” use “she screamed”, rather than “he went” use “he raced”. Give your adjectives and adverbs the same treatment.
You can watch your audience as you go, and get a feel for what moves them.
It is also a fact that while statistics and logic and facts and figures are useful in supporting a point, they will not have the power over your audience that emotion does. People will make decisions (and give out their attention) based on emotions … and justify them afterwards with logic.
So to build audience engagement (and achieve your outcomes) it is vital to make an emotional connection with your audience.
Ten secrets to building audience engagement #6
Why should your audience engage with you in this presentation? Why should they even listen to your speech? What is the incentive?
You need to make them very aware, right from the start, of what they will get and how valuable this commodity will be to them. And one way of doing that is to articulate the commodity and its value.
Obviously you will need to research the audience and what they need and want. And you will need to be crystal clear on what you are offering.
Combine those two and you have a powerful tool.
You can use it in the structure of your presentation. You can use it to design the content. And you can use it in your sales process.
Define your takeaways and articulate them, and your audience will choose to stay engaged, because they know the value of doing so.
Ten secrets to building audience engagement #7
Visuals are a powerful way to build your engagement.
They double the power of the words you use.
People love to look at a screen. Their brains are tuned in to pictures and images. An image will make a point and carry a message just as well as the words you use (“a picture paints a thousand words”).
You just need to remember that the image needs to support the message of your words, so choose it wisely.
Choose it, too, so that your audience relates to it, so that it supports your credibility and your authenticity and brand.
Keep the slides simple with as little text as possible. You will certainly lose engagement if your audience thinks you are treating them as stupid – needing you to read to them something they can read for themselves.
Using the power of visuals
Ten secrets to building audience engagement #8
Call backs are your opportunity to reference back to something in your presentation.
They can create engagement in various ways. You can engage with your audience by creating the impression of being in the same place as them, having the same experiences or emotions or skill levels. You can do this, particularly at the beginning of the presentation, by referring to the venue, or the event or the time of year or location. You can particularly make good use of geographical humour to keep your audience engaged. These all draw the audience into the feeling of sharing a situation with you.
Call back to something someone has said or done, or looked like – someone in the audience, or someone from the same organisation or country. Again you are creating the sense of joint experience with the audience.
Call back to the introduction or the hook within your introduction. Call back to the something you have used to create a vivid picture, or emotion – a story, or an image or some other graphic, or a vivid event in the speech. These will compound the feeling for the audience of being part of your presentation and its development.
Finally, allow members of your audience to call back to those same things. This will be even more powerful if it is humorous. But in any case, it will build engagement through shared participation in your presentation and boosting the engagement of the point made in the first place.
Using call backs.
Ten secrets to building audience engagement #9
People notice change. You notice the hum of the air-conditioner when it comes on and when it goes off – but not in between. So change will re-engage in your presentations as well.
Change what the audience sees of you and your environment. Change your stance and gestures. Change your position and location to emphasis a point. Change the type of visual aids you are using – maybe from flip chart to object to slides. Introduce a video clip into your presentation. Make sure your slides do not follow a template. Introduce something very different or unexpected.
Change the way you present. Use silence and pauses. Change your tone of voice and your speaking volume. All of these will match what you are trying to deliver – facts, stories, data, persuasion, all require different presentation styles, but the change caused by this will also build engagement.
Change your material. Signpost changes or new points you are making, by using a sentence or a word, and a gesture that heralds something new. This regains audience engagement as well as whetting their appetite for more. Change topics.
Change the state of the audience. Have them move into groups to discuss a concept or share ideas about a topic. Change later to simply discussing with a neighbour.
Ask questions. Have them raise their hands to answer. This changes their physical state and allows a change in mental attention as well. Get them moving in some other way.
Changes in your presentation, in your presentation style and in the audience’s own physical, emotional and mental states will maintain and build their engagement.
Use change
Ten secrets to building audience engagement #10
Introduce a story and you have instant engagement. People will stop to listen to stories. People are drawn to stories and take the time to tell their own. This works in conversation … and it will do the same in your speeches. Mention a story and people’s attention snaps on and they are immediately engaged.
Studies have shown that when people listen to stories, their heartbeat slows, their eyes glaze and the brain releases chemicals that make them relax. Their brains switch from a factual processing of information to the storytelling mode. This is sometimes called the Listening Trance or the Storytelling Trance. It activates different centres of the brain and the result is to reduce disagreement, and to activate the search for the moral of the story – turning on focussed engagement.
This is the response that stories evoke, and why the brain is so predisposed to record, so easily, the stories it hears and the points the storyteller associates with them. And it is what makes stories such a powerful tool in engaging your audience.
Stories are also a great way to change the direction and pace of the speech. They give the audience time to relax, as people do when listening to stories, and to absorb the points that have just been made. At the same time you can be creating another point, or reinforcing points you made earlier.
People participate in our stories. They take ownership of the story. Stories that are well crafted let the audience anticipate where you are going. Giving just enough information about the characters and the setting also allow your audience to fill in the details for themselves, thus creating their own version of the story and continuing that participation …. and engagement.
And finally, if we choose them well, our stories can elicit their own stories from our audience members. Look for examples and points that your audience also will have a story about. Your story will elicit their own stories- a further engagement level.
Use stories.
This has been the last of the ten tips on building audience engagement. It really is vital to the success of our public speaking and I wish you well as you build your own success.
