Influence The Audience
Persuade Your Audience
Connect and Influence
When you stand up to speak, you want to influence your audience don’t you? To persuade them to your point of view.
You could try waving bank notes at them but there may be a better way than bribery!
Perhaps you want to encourage them to buy a product or service from you or to take action in a particular way or just listen to your advice and guidance. Or vote for you!
Whatever your purpose, before you can influence the audience, you must connect with them, develop a rapport with them and persuade them as to your expertise. Then your listeners will be much more receptive to your ideas.
So how do you make that magical connection?
Here’s the secret …
What’s In It For Me?
You can be fairly sure that in most situations, the audience’s focus is on what benefits you, the speaker, can offer them. Can you help fix their problem, whatever it might be?
So your first priority is to understand the audience and what they want from you.
You could ask questions to try to involve the audience as much as to extract information. But often people are reluctant to respond, particularly in a large gathering. So try asking a simple question where you think most people would answer ‘yes’.
An example might be, “Who is nervous when speaking to an audience?”
Now raise your own hand and you’ll find the audience response will be greatly increased. And you’ll start to connect with them.
Informing Influence
Of course, before you can influence the audience to your point of view, you need to convince them that you know what you’re talking about. That you can help them to resolve their problem.
You need to present all of the information required to make a decision. But no more!
Relevant facts presented in a clear and confident manner will reassure your audience that you are someone who should be listened to and trusted.
The key word is relevant. Don’t clutter up your presentation with information your listeners don’t need to know.
You need to be sufficiently familiar with your subject to be able to speak with very few notes. Reading from a script won’t wash. Although it’s OK to have complicated facts in note form.
Maintain the Connection
We may not like to admit it, but we all have a relatively short attention span.
If you want to influence your audience, you need to maintain your connection with them. But it is difficult to keep an audience really focussed on what you are saying for more than a few minutes. So you need to help by building in audience ‘relaxation breaks’ fairly frequently.
If you are speaking for any length of time, it’s a good idea to have a glass of water handy. Don’t be afraid to pause and take a sip occasionally.
That brief pause will allow you to look at your notes and it will give the audience time to relax and then re-focus.
If it’s a business event, the participants may have coffee, water or wine in front of them. If you take a sip, it provides the opportunity for the audience to do likewise without appearing to lose interest in your presentation.
The Influence of Humour
Using humour in your presentation will help you to connect with the audience. Get them to laugh from time to time and they will warm to you. And then you’ll be more able to influence them.
Laughter is contagious. Once one or two start to titter, others will follow.
Do you have a point in your speech that you hope will be amusing? Yes? Then you can help it to work with a bit of influence.
As you deliver it, make eye contact with someone who you know is inclined to laugh easily. They’ll likely laugh, then triggering a reaction in others.
If it’s a big audience it will take time for the laughter to spread. Be prepared to pause for quite some seconds until everyone has settled again.
Once more, this allows ‘shuffle’ time for the audience.
By the way, it’s generally wise to avoid telling jokes. Natural humour usually works best and is more appropriate in most situations.
Visual Aids
Visual aids can be an effective way to focus the audience’s attention. This is particularly true if it is an object that you can hold up while speaking about it.
If you are using slides, think about how you can interact with them so that you don’t lose that audience contact. If appropriate, a better alternative could be the so-called ‘chalk and talk’ which uses a whiteboard or flip chart page to bring a more modern approach to the old school blackboard.
Genuine Speakers
Someone who reads from a script will come across as, well, someone who reads from a script.
As mentioned previously, you are unlikely to sound like you really believe what you are saying. The connection will be missing and it’s doubtful you’ll be able to influence the audience.
“Don’t look at what people say, but how they say it.”
Stephen Joseph, professor of psychology at Nottingham University
The way you use your voice and your body language is important. We like to hear people who look and sound enthusiastic.
Above all you need to be genuine when you speak to them.
If that means making the odd mistake or not saying quite what you’d planned, it is still far better than reading a script and sounding like a robot.
Are you persuaded? Can you see how you can influence the audience to aid your speech or presentation?
This post was updated on the 14th May 2025
More Reading
Read the Impact Factory’s take on the ‘Ten Es‘ to influence an audience. (The Impact Factory is one of London’s leading training organisations.)
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