The Art of Engaging Delivery
Techniques to keep your audience engaged throughout your presentation.
In this article, you’ll discover techniques to keep your audience engaged and on the edge of their seat throughout your entire presentation.
Have you ever watched someone give a presentation and, despite the great and interesting information they shared, you struggled to pay attention? Too often speakers bring excellent content to their presentations, but they forget one of the most important parts: creating engagement.
No matter how interesting your content is, without engagement it becomes monotonous and your audience’s attention will naturally start to wander. A presentation is not meant to be a one-sided conversation; the audience should feel like you are speaking with them rather than talking at them.
So how do you give them that feeling when your job is to speak and their job is to listen?
The good news is that there are many different ways to make your audience feel engaged throughout the presentation without having to have one-on-one chats with everyone in the room.
Below, you’ll find some of our favorite public speaking techniques for engaging audiences of all sizes and keeping people’s attention until the very end.
1. RHETORICAL QUESTIONS
One of the things that can make an audience begin to feel disengaged is when they’ve been sitting for too long without being prompted to use their brains. As a speaker, it is crucial you build opportunities into your talk that are designed for your audience to exercise their thought muscles so they pay attention. Rhetorical questions are a beneficial way to ensure people are thinking about what you are presenting and using their minds as you speak. It allows them to see themselves in your content and can even help the points you make stick in their minds longer. You don’t want your audience to feel like you are just grilling them with constant questions, but rather sprinkling them throughout your talk strategically to keep everyone engaged and paying attention throughout your presentation.
It is crucial you build opportunities into your talk that are designed for your audience to exercise their thought muscles so they pay attention.
2. POLL THE AUDIENCE
You have probably seen speakers use this technique a lot: “Raise your hand if…” or “Drop a yes in the chat if….” Polling the audience is one of the most common ways speakers engage their audiences, and for good reason! It works. Asking your audience to raise their hands or message in the chat if a certain situation applies to them, or asking them simple yes or no questions can serve multiple purposes. First, it makes them feel special because you cared enough to wonder about their life. Second, it helps you learn a little bit about the people in your audience so you can navigate your talk in a way that speaks to them. And most importantly, it engages the audience.
3. MOVEMENT
Have you ever been to a presentation where the speaker has you get up and move around, dance, stretch, etc.? It might have felt like they were just making you move around for no reason, but what they were actually doing is making sure you stay engaged. The human body was not designed to sit for long periods of time, and when people have been still for too long they naturally start to disengage. The solution? Get people moving! Physical activity stimulates the brain, releases endorphins, and energizes people so that when they sit back down it is easy for them to focus and re-engage with what you are speaking to them about. Not only do movement breaks help people stay engaged, they can be a lot of fun too, which helps break up more monotonous segments of your talk.
The human body was not designed to sit for long periods of time, and when people have been still for too long they naturally start to disengage.
4. IMPACTS PER MINUTE (IPMs)
Impacts per minute is a system we use at Speaker Nation to measure the quality of a talk. It is simply the average number of emotional moments you create for your audience within a minute of your talk. Think about a great standup comedian. As long as they make the audience laugh on a regular basis, it is quite easy for them to hold people’s attention, but if they go too long without creating one of those impacts the audience starts to disengage. The same applies to a talk. If you go too long without letting the audience feel something, their attention will wander and their engagement will drop. But if you maintain a high IPM throughout your talk, you’re much more likely to have your audience keep all eyes and ears on you.
5. EXERCISES & BREAKOUT SESSIONS
Another popular method for audience engagement is exercises or breakout sessions. Speakers will often spend time explaining a particular concept or theory to the audience and then they will have the audience take some time to do an exercise based on that concept. It can be an individual exercise where participants sit and write down the answer to a particular question, it can be partner or small-group exercises where participants discuss something among themselves, it can be a game of some kind that participants play… The options for exercises and breakout sessions are virtually limitless. Especially in longer presentations, these can be a great way to change the energy of the room and add some variety to the day which will help keep the audience engaged for the long run.
6. MUSIC
Music is a powerful tool for creating engagement. There are songs that will almost universally make people want to dance, there are songs that will make people laugh, there are songs for whatever vibe you wish to create in your audience. Well-planned and well-executed music used in your presentations can improve engagement like almost nothing else can. Music can evoke emotions, it can trigger memories, it can give people perspective on a situation, it can do all kinds of wonderful things for your audience’s brains. Most importantly, it gives them something other than your voice to listen to occasionally, which helps them stay engaged and pay attention to your voice more easily through the rest of your presentation.
Well-planned and well-executed music used in your presentations can improve engagement like almost nothing else can.
7. STAGE POSITIONING
A speaker can dramatically shift the energy of a room just by changing their position relative to the audience. Perhaps you have seen speakers come off the stage and walk around the room, or sit down on the edge of the stage during a more intimate segment of their talk. These kinds of techniques are incredibly powerful for maintaining engagement during a presentation, and when executed well, can really make your audience feel like they are involved in your presentation rather than just sitting there listening to it. In virtual presentation environments you can use similar concepts. Moving close to the camera can make your audience feel like you are speaking directly to them, where moving away makes it feel like you are addressing the whole group. Strategically adjusting your positioning relative to the audience throughout your presentation can shift the energy of your talk and those energy shifts keep your audience engaged and paying attention.
8. GET EXCITED, BE ENGAGED AND HAVE FUN
Have you ever watched someone deliver a talk about something they weren’t very interested in? It’s nearly impossible to pay attention and stay engaged. On the other hand, watch someone deliver a talk about something that excites and fuels them and it’s nearly impossible not to pay attention and be as excited as they are. If you want the audience to feel, you have to feel. If you feel uninspired and disengaged about what you are speaking about, your audience will feel the same. But if you are fired up and engaged, the audience will naturally feel that way along with you. It seems like a simple concept, but it is perhaps one of the most critical concepts in public speaking and one of the most important keys to maintaining good engagement and holding attention.
If you want the audience to feel, you have to feel.
9. BE ENTERTAINING
This seems like it would go without saying, but we’re going to say it anyway, because it’s a message some speakers seem to have missed: if you want to engage your audience and keep their attention, you need to keep them entertained! Children with no entertainment very quickly get distracted and move on to other activities. Well, guess what? Adult audiences are the same way! When a live audience gets bored they start scrolling through their phones, chatting with the person next to them, or leaving the room entirely. Virtual audiences are even worse; when they get bored, they start surfing the internet, scrolling social media, doing other work and tuning out your presentation entirely.
To be engaging and hold people’s attention, you have to earn it by entertaining them. This means you have to work on your storytelling skills, you have to be willing to go all in on your delivery, you have to bring your highest level of energy. As a speaker, you are an entertainer who educates the audience. Take ownership of that and show up with the intention to entertain them so you earn their attention and keep them engaged.
10. LIVE INTERACTION
One of the most effective ways to engage your audience is to interact with them directly. You can use technology to allow them to submit questions through their smartphone, you can call on specific audience members and interact with them one-on-one, you can open up the room to questions, you can do live demonstrations with the audience. There are a number of ways you can directly interact with your audience. Doing so draws people into the conversation you are having with them and makes them feel like they are involved in what you are doing, and people are always more willing to engage with something they feel involved in.
IN CONCLUSION
There are so many different ways you can engage your audience, and there are no right or wrong ways to do it. Your job as a speaker is to experiment with different ideas and figure out which techniques work best for you and your style of speaking. The important thing to remember is that you have to do more than just talk when you are giving a presentation. Talking to a disengaged audience is about as effective as talking to an empty room.
The thing about engagement is that what works for one person doesn’t necessarily work for someone else. So it’s important for you to pay close attention as you watch other presentations, keep track of moments when you stop paying attention, moments when you are completely wrapped up in the presentation, and everything in between. Most importantly, pay attention to what the speaker was doing at those moments. You can use that information to develop your own personal style, figure out the way to engage people that is best suited to your personality and, ultimately, determine what works best with your speaking style.
One of the most effective ways we see people create engagement is leveraging a concept we like to call The Stage Effect. It is a form of influence that naturally makes people drawn to pay attention to you. If you want to learn how you can use The Stage Effect to your advantage we have created a free guide that will help you understand and implement The Stage Effect to dramatically level up the quality of your presentations. Click here to access The Stage Effect for FREE.
