Communicating To Win and Persuade: How To Influence Your Audience By Ogunnowo Zainab

Here are some quick questions for you to answer:

1. What is communication?
2. What is the essence of communication?
3. What is an audience?
4. How do you feel, when after a long talk, the person you've been conversing with asks you to start all over again?
5. How do you feel when, after so much persuasion, the person you've been communicating with refuses your call to action?

If you had by any chance skipped answering the questions, go back and answer them, because doing so would give you an in-depth understanding of this article.

The Oxford Advanced Learners Dictionary defines communication as the concept or state of exchanging data or information. Emphasis on the word "exchange" would help us realise the whole essence of communication. Effective communication entails a lot of messages coming from a sender and accepted by a receiver. The communicator is the sender, and the receiver is the audience.

While you communicate, there must at least be an understanding of all that you've stated by your audience. There could be further progress such as agreeing with your subject of discussion or taking on an action you may have proposed. Most importantly, the message you are trying to convey while communicating must be received by your audience. If not, then you didn't communicate, you were probably just talking.

This phenomenon would give a clear reason as to why there is a difference between "hear" and "listen".  As long as the mode of communication provides a sound then your audience can hear you, but if there's a message gotten and a pondering action from all the sound you made, then they've listened. This is the reason why you may have spoken to your friend for over 15 minutes, then she suddenly asks you to start all over again. She heard what you said, but she didn't listen!

 The big question now is, how do you successfully communicate and ensure that your audience listens?

Communicating To Win and Persuade

What is the essence of persuasion when your audience doesn't even know that you are trying to persuade? How do you intend to win in a communication when your audience can't even get the message you are passing? How do you think students choose their favourite speakers in an event and they tag some other set of speakers boring?

It is quite simple! While all the speakers had spoken thinking they had communicated, although they spoke, only a few were able to pass across their messages and get the students to listen! The others had messages to pass too, but they were just talking! If you want to be that speaker that communicates and makes the audience listen, here are some tips for you to hold on to:

●       Confidence: You can't expect people to listen to you when you look, sound, and act like you don't know what you are saying. Even if you are not so sure and you are not 100% convinced, as long as you are keen on passing a message, own it!

●        Audibility: There's no way you would successfully communicate when you are speaking under your breath. It is understandable that some people naturally have tiny and low voices. In this case, you don't have to shout, but for the sake of effective communication, you have to learn how to project your voice.

●       Speak Your Audience's Language: Know your audience and ensure you are speaking the language they understand. This would avoid the struggle to understand by both parties and promote effective communication.

●       Use Relatable Words: For the sake of effective communication, ensure you speak using words your audience can understand and avoid the complexity of grammar and language.

●       Continuously Check For Attention: While communicating, ensure that you still have the attention of your audience. You could do this by adding a sense of humour, saying something interesting, taking pauses or breaks, and asking questions. This would help bring back the audience's attention if at all it has been diverted.

Implementing all of these would ensure effective communication. However, there's a little more action to add to your communication to influence your audience and make them accept your persuasion or call to action. An audience accepting your call to action is indeed the win in communication.

How To Influence Your Audience

Extremely effective communication would go beyond just passing a message but will proceed to make your audience take an action that you want them to. I used "extremely effective communication" because you can communicate effectively, and your audience listens to you and understands the message you passed, but still disagrees with your call to action.

Influencing an audience through communication is a very critical aspect of communication that is required and more practical because nobody really communicates without wanting an action from their audience. It is the essence behind speeches, debates, advertising, presentations, PowerPoint presentation, staged proposals, marketing, school project defence by final year students, etc.

To influence your audience through communication, you have to know how to communicate first, and the tips to do that have been stated earlier. Now that you know how to communicate, there are a few more actions you need to boost your communicative ability to influence your audience. They are:

●       Confidence: This is coming down here again because it is very essential. You can't expect people to believe you and take an action that you are not saying confidently. It is like telling people that a plane would not crash in a shaky voice.

●       Be Convincing: This is an action that would take over you if you can maintain confidence while communicating. Ensure you provide clarity on every possible and positive reason behind your stance and call to action.

●       Infuse Emotions: Ensure you are communicating with the right display of emotion while speaking. Do that with your body language, facial expression, and tone of speaking. This would build interest and connection between you and your audience. Infusing emotions while communicating would strike a bone.

●       Portray The Benefits: If you are trying to call your audience to action, make them see the reasons why they should. Ensure you emphasise the benefits attached to their action. Create emergence by stating what has gone to ruins and would go to ruins if the action is not taken.

 

Doing all of these in addition to the effective communication tips stated earlier would promote effective communication as well as influence your audience to accept your persuasion or call to action. Communicating is an inevitable aspect of our lives and it is a great factor that helps in leveraging opportunities. If there's an opportunity open to you right now and the criteria is effective communication, you just learned how to communicate to win and persuade and how to influence your audience. Rise now, implement all that you've learned from that opportunity, and take the lead.