Does it seem like it’s harder than ever to gain and maintain your audience’s attention? If you think so, you aren’t alone. According to PEW Research Center, 87% of teachers believe that today’s technology is creating an “easily distracted generation with short attention spans.” And it’s true, we have more information and distractions coming at us than ever before. But we can’t be too quick to place all the blame on the audience.
Some of the problem is that many speakers today haven’t adapted their messages to the modern world. Some of us are still presenting like we live in the dark ages. But once we know the science of attention, we can plan ways to better earn and keep the attention of our audiences. So let’s explore 3 specific attention strategies you can use and why they work.
Make it relevant.
One of the first things you can do to gain attention is to tell the audience why your presentation is relevant for them. This means you’ll have to spend some time studying who your audience is and what they need from your presentation. It might help to take advice from seoClarity, a company who specializes in SEO (search engine optimization) marketing. SEO marketers are specialists in building content around what an audience needs. And they say to think in terms of questions instead of keywords. As you prepare content, think about what questions the audience has and needs you to answer. Identify what really matters to them and build your content around that.
For example, say you are presenting information on the Enneagram personality typing tool to a group of coworkers who are unfamiliar with it. Your instinct might be to start with its history, after all, that’s where you’re supposed to start, right? But if you think about what your audience wants to know in terms of questions, it will lead you to things like “how do I know what type I am?” or “how can I use this in my relationships?” You can bet the audience’s attention is probably going to falter during a segment on history. However, if you are telling them how this tool can make them more self-aware or give insight into their relationships, it will keep their attention. Because we pay attention to the things that matter to us.
Break it up.
One of the most basic presentation formats is a message followed by a Q & A or discussion time. However, research has shown that our audience can benefit from introducing those active learning strategies (group work, Q & A, discussion, audience participation, etc.) earlier in the presentation. Researchers measuring student attention spans during college lectures found these types of active learning strategies had a “dual benefit.” First, students paid more attention to active learning segments than lecture segments. In addition, students had an easier time paying attention to the lecture that followed the active learning strategy like a demonstration or a question.
So as far as attention spans are concerned, all speakers should be employing active learning strategies. For example, try asking a few questions throughout your presentation or asking the audience members to share thoughts with the people around them. This will not only get the audience’s attention, but it will keep them engaged when you switch back to presenting your message.
Switch it up.
The final tip to gain and maintain attention is to develop a presentation with variety. We like to use terms like multimedia and multimodal, but what we really mean is that great presenters switch it up. Remember that statistic above in which 87% of teachers think students are distracted by technology? That proves that technology has the power to grab our attention. So instead of fighting against it in our presentations, we need to be leveraging it.
Very few speakers can engage their audience for long periods of time just by talking. So we need to employ video and audio and pictures. We need to invite others to collaborate in the sharing of the message. And we need to use familiar methods of communication that already resonate with our audiences. In other words, our presentations need to mirror the way we consume information already.
So if you want to gain and keep your audience’s attention, you have to develop relevant content. You have to break up long sessions of talking with more active learning strategies like discussion. And you have to be willing to create multimodal presentations.
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