No matter how incredibly awesome your presentation may be on stage, the average audience member will walk away remembering anywhere from 10-40% of what you actually said. After twenty-four hours, that retention is virtually cut in half…and cut in half again by the end of the week. At the one month mark, you’ll be lucky if one in twenty people can remember your closing line.
There are several tricks to get your audience’s memory retention to go way up though, and we will talk about them now:
- The first tip is probably the easiest- just make your messages easy to remember by keeping your speaking points simple. The more complex your speech is with technical or confusing material, the harder it will be for others to retain long-term.
- Create visual images of the concepts you’re explaining. This happens through direct dialogue where you’re challenging the audience to use other sensory parts of their brain to see, hear, taste, smell or even feel an image, which is also called the VAK’s, visual, auditory, kinesthetic sensory words. We experience events through our senses and when you create highly sensory stories, people can remember the story easier.
- Get your point across by telling a compelling story. If the audience can relate to it and feel what the characters of your story are going through, then it will stick with them for a much longer period of time. When you make your story relatable to your audience and you invite them into your story they will experience the same emotions as your character.
- Another method is to have the audience do an exercise to reinforce your point. Experiential learning will make your point stick.
- Also, go back to key points of your presentation often…especially in longer speeches. For example, if your presentation is teaching “Four Elements of Business Success,” then you want to mention the first element in passing while you’re talking about tips two, three and four. You can also do this in your transitions. Example, “now that you learned that first element is “lead with passion,” lets talk about the second element.
- One final idea is to physically ask the audience about what they’ve learned before moving onto a different concept. If some still seem to be unclear, then you’d better take an extra 30 seconds to drive home your point…and then update your presentation moving forward to clarify things.