Being able to influence an audience and persuade them to take action requires careful planning, consideration, and preparation.
Powerfully persuasive presentations use a mixture of facts, logic, and empathy to help an audience see an issue from a different perspective, causing them to take action.
Here are four proven techniques for powerfully influencing and persuading your audience:
Decide on a single ask (or Call-to-Action)
Decide on one thing you want your audience to think, feel or do after they’ve listened to your presentation. This is usually centered around your ONE BIG MESSAGE®. If your message is not clearly defined, or you are diluting it with too many call-to-actions, it can cause the audience to lose focus. They’ll switch off, look at their phones or start thinking about what they’re going to have for lunch.
You want them focused on YOU and be influenced by your ONE BIG MESSAGE®.
Create an emotional connection
We don’t make decisions based on facts alone. A big part of our decision-making is emotion.
Zaltman’s (2016) study showed that 95% of our thinking happens in the ‘emotional brain’. Zaltman’s 2000 seminal study found that when humans had damaged the area of their brain where emotions were generated and processed, despite still being able to use logic and function completely normally, individuals that were void of emotion seriously struggled to make any decisions, even simple decisions like what to eat for lunch.
Understanding your audience’s needs and making sure that you understand their challenges is the first step to creating an emotional connection with them. You can demonstrate your understanding too in your presentation and this will impress your audience and encourage them to buy into you.
Connect through stories
The other way to emotionally connect with your audience is through stories. Stories engage more parts of our brains, including our sensory cortex, which is responsible for processing
visual, auditory, and other stimuli. They allow a much higher emotional recall than facts and figures alone, and they can turn a very ‘dry’ subject into something more colorful or interesting.
By perfecting your storytelling skills, you can tap into the ‘reward’ part of people’s brains, creating an immediate emotional connection.
Download The 6C’s of Strategic Storytelling™ to find out more >>
A good hook
You have about 30 seconds at the beginning to get your audience interested in what you have to say. That might sound like no time at all, but with careful planning, it can be done.
One of the strategies you could use as your hook is to make a claim.
For example:
“My name is Natsuyo Lipschutz and I’m going to talk to you about the importance of eating cake.”
Of course, your message isn’t about that at all, but the moral of your story might be to indulge in things you enjoy more, so I’m using what I like to indulge in to make me instantly relatable to my audience.
If you want to teach yourself to create powerfully persuasive presentations, you can enrol on my online course ‘The Art of Persuasive Speaking in Global Business.’
This is gives you a step-by-step strategy to support you through the process of creating a powerful and unforgettable presentation.
