Part of telling a good story includes your body language and tone of voice. These two things can destroy a perfect story in a second. It can significantly impact your overall goal and what you want your viewers or customers to do. When you have the right tone, you can better connect and relate with your audience to persuade them to take the right actions that benefit your business.
The more you relate to your audience, the more positive engagement you create. It can inspire them to do something. It can make them feel powerful or emotional. Your body language can be used to gain their trust, so they see you as someone who can solve their problems—in turn increasing your sales, other important conversions, and business goals.
The following are a few tips to keep in mind when developing and creating stories or other presentations:
Match Your Body Language to Your Tone and Your Objectives
If you are excited, show the excitement. If you are sad, make sure you don’t have a smile on your face, and so on. In other words, any gesture you make, make sure it makes sense to your overall goal and tone.
Whatever emotions you want your audience to feel, you need to emulate them and express them accurately. You don’t want your audience laughing when telling them a story about struggle or death, for example.
Keep It Inconsistent
While consistency is key to many things, your tone and body language are not one of them. If you keep them the same all the time, you will never communicate to your audience correctly.
Just think about it, if you were to tell your customers a sad story but said it in the same excited voice you had when you introduced yourself, you will likely steer your audience in the wrong direction or confuse them completely. They won’t know if they should feel sad, should wait for an uplifting ending, or they will be left wondering why you are so excited when you just shared a tragic situation.
Plan It Out
Every great story and presentation needs a plan. Just because you think a certain tone or body language will be natural doesn’t mean you shouldn’t prepare for it. Just like a movie script, identify what tone you need to have and the gestures or body language you want to display for each scene.
Identify Your Main Objective
Match your tone and body language to your overall goal. If you want your audience to be excited and take action, show them. Don’t ever rely on your words alone to get your message or goal across. You need the right words with the right attitude to be successful.
As you can see, the tone and body language you display can make a clear difference in the overall goal of the presentation. As they say, attitudes are contagious, and it starts with your tone and movements. If you want your audience to take action, be the example.
Over the next 60 days, we will be talking exclusively about becoming a better storyteller so you can work on increasing your audience engagement.
It’s a fact that the human brain is wired or attracted to stories. This is because stories are how the human brain learns, grows, and remembers things. Through stories, you can better remember important events and communicate or connect with your peers and audience. And, more importantly, through stories, you gain audience engagement and the action required to run a successful and sustainable business.
Let’s be honest, we know that you’re unlikely to follow us through the entire series, so here’s a little cheat for you – the entire series of articles as an ebook – our gift – no strings attached. If you’re ready to catch up on some summer reading that will actually propel your business forward then this is for you.
DOWNLOAD THE FREE E-BOOK: Become a Good Storyteller to Increase Audience Engagement
