How To Interact with Your Audience When Giving a Business Presentation

When you're tasked with giving a business presentation, there is nothing worse (besides actually getting on stage!) than staring out into a sea of faces to see heads buried in phones or people staring back at you, looking like they'd rather be anywhere but sitting in front of you.

Yet, despite 15% of Britons admitting to having glossophobia, sometimes it's not speaking that you need to fear its unengaged audience members.

We've all been stuck in less-than-inspiring presentations, where every slide is the same beige colour and lacks presentation features like word cloud polls, images, etc. Due to this, lethargy soon sets in, and we start daydreaming, communicating with our neighbour via hand signals, or doing anything that distracts us from what's happening in front of us.

Although when we're in this position, we may feel as though we're being discreet often, the speaker is fully aware of our disengagement. Therefore, to prevent us from suffering the same fate when delivering a presentation, we must understand how to interact with our audience to keep them engaged and attentive to what we're saying. To help you, we've outlined several of the best ways to interact with your audience in our article below:

Ask Your Audience Questions

Typically, if you're not getting the reaction that you want out of your audience, the reason lies within the questions that you're asking. By asking the right 'why's', 'how's' and 'where’s’, you can gain unique insights, support arguments, rise to challenges, and identify any knowledge gaps that could benefit from being smoothed over.

However, although questioning can have a significant impact on the response your presentation gets, it's essential that you’re not picking on audience members randomly or focusing on one. Instead, you must be strategic with your approach and allow them to interact with your questions organically. This will encourage others to get involved instead of making them fear being singled out.

One of the best ways to encourage organic participation is through poll questions and live word cloud, as included in the Vevox app, which allows you to see the most popular audience responses in real time. Consider visiting their website for more information, or contact a team member directly to see how their engagement tools could help you interact with your audience better today.

Crack A Few Jokes

Pitching a business presentation can be incredibly daunting since everyone at the office expects you to knock it out of the park. With everything resting on your shoulders, you might feel nervous about your upcoming presentation, which can only accelerate once you’re on stage and staring out into a sea of unfamiliar faces.

As a result of the nerves, we’re often left stumbling over our words, racing to get through the presentation, and speaking faster than we can get our speech out – not the best way to interact with our audience and get our point across. One of the best ways to avoid blunders like this is to humanise our audience by showing glimpses of your personality and cracking a few jokes.

Although there is a time and place for some jokes, there's no harm in easing the tension by sprinkling a few jokes throughout your presentation since it triggers the release of endorphins – the body’s feel-good chemicals – which can temporarily relieve the physical symptoms of anxiety and stress and build rapport with audience members.

Not only can humour make you feel more at ease when delivering your presentation, but if you’re in a situation where you must pitch alongside competitors, it’ll make your presentation memorable if you make people laugh. In turn, your audience will most likely be able to recall your key points and ideas, which is better for business.

Keep Your Presentation Simple

We’ve all sat in monotonous meetings where a dull PowerPoint presentation is accompanied by an equally boring (and often long!) speech from the presenter. Ultimately, we don’t want to recreate this experience for our audience members; we want to improve it.

However, this doesn’t mean going mad with word cloud polls, images, text, etc., and practically assaulting our audience's senses. Instead, it's essential to plan your presentation to make it as interactive and appealing as possible while keeping it clean, concise, and simple to follow.

You can do this by including only necessary information, using only a few slides, limiting the use of bright colours, not using too many transitions, and much more. Failure to plan your presentation can make it distracting instead of informative, which might cause audience members to switch off and become disengaged from what you’re saying – something that you don’t want!

Don’t forget, anything you can’t include in your presentation can always be covered in a Q&A afterwards, and at times something you felt was important might not even get mentioned on the day.