Golden rules for engaging presentation audiences

 

Discover simple strategies to transform your online event attendees into active participants.

What is engagement, and why is it important? In short, engagement is when the audience actively participates in actions related to the presentation and interacts with the speakers and each other. Over 60% of online event and webinar attendees believe that engagement makes a presentation more interesting, persuasive, and memorable.

There are numerous complex and detailed schemes for creating presentations and webinars that ensure audience engagement. The problem is, despite their theoretical appeal, these schemes aren’t always adaptable to the specific task at hand. Therefore, after analyzing the experiences of our team and Pitch Avatar clients, we’ve distilled everything you need to know for effective audience engagement into three simple rules.

Engage with the audience throughout the presentation, from start to finish.

It was once thought that a Q&A session at the end of a presentation was sufficient for audience engagement. However, research shows that viewers may lose interest within 15 seconds to a minute. Those who stay through the first three slides are more likely to watch the entire presentation. Based on this, ensure active interaction with the audience from the very beginning and keep it going until the end. For example, start with a quick poll or quiz with fun questions related to the presentation, promising prizes such as discounts or special offers for your product. This approach will likely secure at least a couple of customers. You can also hold another quiz closer to the end. Another good method is to break the Q&A session into several parts. There are many options, but you get the idea.

Note that you can organize active interaction not only during live broadcasts but also with recorded presentations. Use our Pitch Avatar’s unique feedback system for this purpose.

Refresh audience attention through variety

Monotony is the most effective killer of audience attention. Therefore, use several different engagement methods throughout your presentation. You can conduct polls and quizzes, answer audience questions, encourage viewers to interact with interactive slides, and share their impressions, stories, and comments—all within one presentation. It’s even better if each part of the presentation, including the interactive segments, is conducted by a new speaker. If you lack presenters, you can create them using the Pitch Avatar presenter AI assistant.

Engage the audience before the presentation and keep them engaged after the event

You know that the sooner you engage with a potential client after a presentation, the higher the likelihood they’ll become an actual client. This leads to the well-known “One Simple Next Step” rule: at the end of the presentation, it should be clear what single action the viewer should take to continue interacting with your company. This could be clicking a link to download a demo version of your product or to go to the order page.

This is a great rule, but why not take a broader view? You can send quizzes, surveys, tests, minute-long mini-presentations with interactive slides (including lead forms) both before and after the presentation. The key is that all of these should lead to direct benefits for the client. Whether it’s a gift certificate, discount, or special cooperation terms doesn’t matter as much as the benefit itself.

In conclusion, these rules will only work perfectly if the audience feels you are fully immersed in the presentation topic and genuinely interested in it. In other words, to engage others, you must first engage yourself.

Wishing you all successful presentations and high revenues!

--------------

Source: Pitch Avatar Blog