11 audience engagement strategies for all presentations

Don’t panic, but if you want to engage your audience in a presentation, you have about 30 seconds to make it happen. Recent studies show that the first lapse of attention happens within the first minute of a talk. If you haven’t caught their attention yet, there’s a good chance you’ll lose their focus to their phone, laptop, reading materials, daydreams, etc.

However, there are a few ways to interact with audience members that can help you hijack a person’s flighty focus and reset audience engagement. Then you can direct their attention towards hanging on to your every word.

Over the years, Duarte’s studied thousands of effective presentations. These presentations kept audiences engaged, engrossed, and even on the edge of their seats. What we’ve learned is that three key elements largely determine your success in engaging the audience:

1. How you structure your presentation
2. How well you understand your audience
3. And how you deliver the information

11 audience engagement strategies

Within those three elements, we will cover 11 audience engagement strategies to help you engage your audience and increase audience engagement during every presentation.

Audience engagement strategy no. 1: Use a story framework

In Resonate®, Duarte’s CEO, Nancy Duarte, explains how most great presentations use the same structure as our favorite myths, movies, and books. Setting up your presentation as a story can help engross an audience. It lets you build the information you deliver into a narrative with drama that will keep them riveted — no matter how technical or dense your presentation might be. Duarte says, “Creating desire in the audience and then showing how your ideas fill that desire moves people to adopt your perspective. This is the heart of story.”

The easiest way to engage your audience with a story framework is by defining a beginning, middle, and end.

• The beginning: The beginning of your story serves as a call to adventure. It’s where you set up for the audience a baseline reality and the problems they grapple with today — think of this as what is. The beginning should include concise information about what everyone agrees is true.
• The middle: The middle of the presentation, is generally longer than the beginning and shows a series of contrasts. It reveals to audience members what could be in the future vs. what is now. Building contrasting elements into your presentation helps hold an audience’s attention. They enjoy experiencing a small dilemma, and then learning its resolution.
• The end: The end of the presentation should leave the audience with a concrete, ultimate sense of what could be. We call this the new bliss. They just need to be willing to be transformed. It should describe potential future outcomes with wonder and awe, leaving audiences inspired. You should also use the ending to repeat the most important points from the previous parts of the story, and to deliver your call to action.

Audience engagement strategy no. 2: Structure your presentation right

The next most crucial step in increasing audience engagement is actually taken before your presentation begins. It’s when you’re planning it.

We recommend using a Presentation Sparkline™ as a guide for your presentation structure. Going between what could be and what is within your story framework is our best recommendation for most presentations. (Check out what non-successful presentation structures look like here.)

Audience engagement strategy no. 3: Use turning points

Even if you succeed in engaging your audience, listeners need guidance to stay on track. For this purpose, use distinct turning points to move them through the presentation so that you maintain audience engagement.

Turning point #1

The call to adventure should come just after the beginning of your story. It should move listeners to the middle. The call to adventure puts forth a Big Idea™ of what could be, which stands in stark contrast to what is — and it quite suddenly destabilizes the status quo.

Your audience can’t help but want to resolve the gap. They’ll pay attention as you build towards a conclusion.

Turning point #2

The call to action is at the end. As you move your audience from the middle to the end of your presentation, the call to action must clearly articulate what the audience can do to move from what is to what could be. Include discrete tasks that will help bring the ideas you’ve presented to fruition.

After your call to action, your ending will inspire audience members and remind them of the rewards they will reap if they’re moved to act.

Audience engagement strategy no. 4: Connect before you start

An easy way to increase audience engagement is to take the time to connect with them before you even present. Even if you craft a spellbinding, dramatic narrative, there’s still a chance that you can lose audience members as you talk — especially if those listeners can’t relate to you.

To ensure maximum audience engagement, make sure you find common ground with the people to whom you’re presenting. Common ground helps create empathy; if an audience can relate to the story you are telling them, they’ll empathize with you and may begin to care.

Audience engagement strategy no. 5: Know and segment your audience

Know your audience before you present so you can be sure you’re relevant. By taking the time to get to know them in advance, you can start to segment them into groups. After you’ve segmented them into groups, you can make sure your presentation addresses each subsegment of your audience, so you can connect, relate, and inspire as many audience members as possible.

Now sometimes, you might not be able to speak to all subsegments of an audience. And that’s okay! One of the best audience engagement strategies is to choose the subsegment that is most likely to adopt your perspective and appeal to them. There are countless ways to segment an audience, including demographics, job titles, geographies, and more. Try and download our free Audience Needs Map™ to get started!

Audience engagement strategy no. 6: Meet the hero

One tip: Your audience is the hero in this story. Not you. What this means is you need to really understand your audience, your hero, before you take them on this journey. Get specific and think of the individuals in your audience. Think about what kind of event you’re speaking at, and why most people are there. Then, ask yourself the following questions:

• How do they spend a day?
• What keeps them up at night?
• How do they spend their paychecks?
• What are their likable qualities?
• Name things they prioritize.
• Do they already know a lot about what you are going to tell them, and what do they need to learn more about?
• How do they give and receive respect?
• How do they make decisions?
• What biases do they have?

Once you answer these questions, you can better determine what experiences they will relate to. When crafting your presentation, you can rely on those shared experiences to relay information in a way that resonates. Ask yourself:

• What memories, historical events, or interests do you have in common?
• What types of outcomes are mutually desired?
• Why are you uniquely qualified to be their guide?
• What similar journey have you gone on with a positive outcome?

Ultimately, you should communicate from the common ground — you’ll build credibility, and keep the ear of the people that you need to hear you.

Audience engagement strategy no. 7: Practice

Even the most well-thought-out, well-crafted, audience-centric presentations can lose people if they’re not delivered well. Remember Charlie Brown’s teacher in the Peanuts cartoons? If you’re not focused on your presentation’s delivery, you may end up sounding just like him to listeners.

Make sure you practice the delivery of your presentation to really maximize your audience engagement. If you need help with that, learn about hiring an executive speaker coach, or take a public speaking workshop like Captivate™ to get started.

Audience engagement strategy no. 8: Interact with them from the get-go

Remember that your presentation isn’t a speech. There’s no need to simply stand and read information off of a slide or a piece of paper. Instead, use your presentation to engage and interact with the audience.

A quick audience engagement example is to make sure you interact with them within the first two minutes of your presentation. This allows you to build a connection with them right up front. Not sure how to interact with the people listening to you? Here are some ideas:

• Tell a joke (try to get them to laugh)
• Ask them to “Raise your hand if … ”
• Tell a quick story, then ask “Has that ever happened to you? Yeah, I see some heads nodding … ”
• Ask them to give a round of applause for something …

Audience engagement strategy no. 9: Match your tone of voice to the setting

There’s no need to drone on in a monotone, even if you are delivering serious information. However, for optimal audience engagement, you should try to match your tone of voice to the setting.

If you’re unsure what type of tone your presentation should take, try using the dress code as a measure. Dress code is one of the ways we help clients gauge their tone of voice, and we try to aim for one notch above our audience.

For instance, if they’re business casual, we might dress just one more step above that … and we’d match our tone of voice to that same level.

Audience engagement strategy no. 10: Move with intention

Don’t stand still, but don’t pace like a caged panther, either. The amount of movement you do on stage during your presentation can have a huge effect on how well people can pay attention to you. If you stand behind the podium the entire time, you’ll probably be too boring to engage the audience. But if you pace like you’re a hungry panther in a zoo cage, you’re going to be distracting.

The goal of any good presenter is to be purposeful in your movements. Whatever manner you choose to move onstage, it should help to both engage your audience’s attention and get your message across.

The worst mistake to make in terms of movement? Don’t let your unconscious movements be in control. Work on taming those distracting nervous tics before you take the podium. Things like filler words, stutters, or performance anxiety can all be fixed!

Audience engagement strategy no. 11: No slide-reading

Don’t pause to let your audience members read slides. Gasp!

We get it. We’re in the slide-making business. And slides are an important part of your presentation because they help communicate your ideas visually. However, there’s no need to pause and let audience members read them — that will interrupt the flow of your presentation and distract people from keeping their attention on you.

Instead, refer to your slides as you speak — but don’t let them take over. Slides are background, like set decoration in a play. They should help enhance the message, but not ever be noticed so much that they get in the way. Referring to them is the same thing. Refer to them if that helps your audience better understand them, but not more.

If your slides are too busy? Simplify them and make sure they pass The Glance Test™. And if you argue that all that information needs to be communicated, consider whether it needs to be a part of your presentation. It might be better off as a pre-read or a leave-behind. We call those Slidedocs®, and we have easy free templates to help you design them in a visually digestible way.

Master audience engagement the easy way

Let’s face it – going into a presentation can be nerve-wracking. However, if you structure your presentation like a story while keeping your audience’s needs front of mind, you’re so much closer at delivering an engaging presentation. Pair that with presentation practice, where you present calmly and confidently, and you’ll eliminate the fear that you’ll bore the people silly. You can also reap the ultimate grand prize that all presenters seek: That your engaged audience leaves believing in your ideas and ready to act to make them a reality.

If you’re ready to nail your next keynote or presentation with optimal audience engagement, hire an executive speaker coach today. They can help you with the structure of your presentation, the rehearsal, or even point out those nervous tics you need to tame.

And if you’d rather take things slow, we still recommend taking our Resonate® workshop. This course is designed to help you build your presentation with a story framework and contrast for maximum engagement. Follow that with a Captivate™ workshop, where you can practice your delivery and hone those public speaking skills, and you’ll be all set for your big stage moment!

This article was originally published on March 31, 2017. It has been updated in August 2024 for relevancy.