3 Steps to Win Engagement with your Virtual Audience
By JULIETTE JENNER
Connecting with your audience is more critical than ever. People sit in Zoom and Teams meetings all day; they’re chronically distracted and digitally fatigued. Unless you connect with them on a deeper human level, it’s impossible to get engagement and build rapport with your stakeholders virtually.
Engagement requires an emotional connection. The emotional bond is the driving force to influence your audience and win their buy-in. The emotional connection is determined by the positive feelings your stakeholders have toward you in order to influence them. Research by Motista found that emotionally connected stakeholders are more than twice as valuable as highly satisfied clients.
In my experience over the years coaching professionals and leaders, the most effective ways to build a connection with your virtual audience include three essential components: showing up, making the relationship your key focus, and storytelling.
1. Show up
Just like you have to show up in the room, you have to do the same virtually. Showing up means having presence and energy. Without these, it will be difficult to get your message across and have an impact.
Showing up virtually requires you to be comfortable on camera. You have to look and feel confident and authentic to enhance your ability to influence your audience through the camera. This is the first step to getting engagement from your virtual audience.
2. Make the relationship your key focus
The second crucial step to getting engagement is to make the relationship your key focus. If you focus on the content only, you’ll lose connection with your virtual audience.
There are several ways to increase connection online by focusing on the relationship. Paying attention to what your audience thinks, feels and needs is crucial. You need to make them feel that their participation and opinion matters. You can achieve this in simple ways by using polls, emojis for signals, asking questions, reading body language in video calls, asking your audience to share their opinions in the chat, and acknowledging and appreciating them when they do.
Focusing on the relationship assures your audience that they matter and that you are not only there to push content, but you understand and empathise with them. It sets a great foundation to build trust and win their hearts.
Studies have shown that when people hear stories, their whole brain lights up and produces hormones such as dopamine, cortisol, endorphins, and oxytocin that make them feel all emotions. It’s the emotions that move your audience to connect, make decisions and take action.
3. Tell a story
The third step to engage with your virtual audience is to tell a story. Storytelling enables you to relate to your audience more emotionally and authentically because statistics, facts, and information alone don’t connect to people’s hearts.
Studies have shown that when people hear stories, their whole brain lights up and produces hormones such as dopamine, cortisol, endorphins, and oxytocin that make them feel all emotions. It’s the emotions that move your audience to connect, make decisions and take action.
Therefore, you must know how to tell a story if you want to engage your audience. Your story has to be emotionally inspiring, valuable, or solves a problem for your audience. It’s the most effective way to connect to their hearts.
Knowing how to apply these three steps like a pro is a game-changer! We’re hosting a 90 minute Virtual Communication Webinar to go into detail by demonstrating how to harness these and other communication skills required to show up online with confidence, build key relationships and become a powerful storyteller.
