Engage Your Audience

It’s crucial that you don’t just create your slides in isolation, but think how they might relate to the polls you are asking your audience, or the points at which you are going to invite them to ask questions or tweet your slide. If you want to engage audiences, design your content to form a conversation, not a lecture.

Try to combine the core message of your presentation alongside the interaction.

Create audience participation instead of a one-way communication. Think of every training session or presentation as an interactive experience to engage audiences as much as possible. Then decide at what points you can ask for your delegates’ views and how you could then work these back into the conversation in a logical way.

Ask for feedback frequently.

Ask questions throughout, and check in at various intervals to confirm understanding to ensure your points are being understood. Ask for ‘likes’ to confirm people are happy that you’ve covered everything on the slide and before you move on.
Of course - these are just ideas - it’s crucial that you play your part to engage audiences. Use the technology and interactive tools at your disposal to create a dialogue that works for you and your style, or the audience you are presenting to.

When people attend your presentation, they are spending the time to listen to you and will want to leave the room with clear benefits from having done so. Audiences are often seeking to learn from attending presentations - to understand new products or services that might benefit them or their business, or to discover new ways of doing things that will improve their lives or make things easier. In any case, they are seeking to benefit from attending your presentation.

As a result, it’s often good practice to outline what you will be presenting and how it will add value to them right at the very start of your presentation. You need to say concrete and specific details about how what you are about to say will have a positive effect. How will it save them time, save them money, or make their job or life easier? To keep your audiences engaged, clearly spell out the benefits you are providing for those giving you their time and attention.

It’s also good practice to summarise these benefits at the end of the presentation as well. There is the old saying “tell ‘em what you’re going to say, say it, and then tell ‘em what you said.” However, rather than just list what you are going to talk about and then wrap up what you just said, focus on the benefits of what you are about to tell your audience, and then reiterate these at the end.

The National Statistics Council has indicated that people in the modern-day business environment spend an average of 37% of their work week in meetings and presentations. Wow, that’s 96 full working days spent on presentations. Think how hard it is to get an expense signed off within a large organisation, yet how it easy it is to call 20 important (and costly) people into a meeting room for an hour.

So if you are running meetings or events big and small, make sure your message is quick and to the point, otherwise you’ll lose audience engagement. Stick to your plan and finish within the time you have been given for the specific training session or presentation. Not only does being concise signal to your client or boss that you respect their time and intelligence, it also helps to engage audiences more easily.

Anyone tasked with delivering a message to others knows, you need to engage audiences to make an impact. When making presentations for meetings or events, delivering feedback, or leading a training session, without audience engagement people are less attentive and the process of communication is less effective.