Appeal to the Audience: How to Connect Your Idea to Their Desires

This article is an excerpt from the Shortform book guide to "Amplify Your Influence" by René Rodriguez. Shortform has the world's best summaries and analyses of books you should be reading.

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Why is it important to appeal to the audience? Do you know what your audience’s specific needs are?

Whether you’re selling a product, giving a presentation, or asking your team to adopt a new software platform, you need to know what your audience wants out of it. Without your audience, you’ll never be able to sell your products or ideas. So, you should try to appeal to what they want and need.

Continue reading to learn how to connect your message with your audience’s needs and desires.

Explain Why Your Main Idea Is Important to the Audience

According to René Rodriguez, an essential step for ensuring people understand and remember your main idea is to appeal to the audience by tying it back to their specific needs and interests. How will your idea help them reach their specific aspirations? How will it benefit them to know and act on this information?

Connecting your main idea to your audience’s distinct interests ensures that it stands out among the countless other pieces of information they encounter every day. The human brain is constantly exposed to stimuli in the form of emails, text messages, television, colors, sounds, smells, and so on, so it has to quickly determine what’s important enough to be retained.

To effectively state your idea’s value, understanding your audience is key—listen to their wants and concerns and ask questions that help you get to know them and their interests. In this part of your communication, also clearly express what you want your audience to do with the information you’ve given them.

Shortform Example: Explaining the Value of Meditation

For example, if your main idea is that meditation can be a helpful wellness tool at the office, and your audience is a group of office workers, you’d need to demonstrate what specific benefits meditation would hold for people with their job. Therefore, you might finish by talking about how meditation can be an effective method of stress management, which is an important part of handling any demanding job. You may also explain how meditation can increase energy and focus, making it a possible alternative to caffeine.

Finally, you must explain how the audience can apply the information. You might suggest they practice for 10 minutes a day or offer some resources for guided meditation. This clearly shows what action you expect them to take and what kind of behavior change you’re trying to trigger.

Approaches for Connecting With Your Audience’s Needs and Interests

If you want more specific guidance for using questions to gauge an audience’s interests, some public speaking experts suggest using a call-and-response technique at the beginning of a presentation. Ask questions that will prompt responses indicating how much your audience knows about your topic and what their general mood is. You can then adjust your approach to fit their needs, including tailoring your main idea to them at the end of your presentation.

You can ensure your ideas stand out throughout your presentation by presenting kinesthetically: using the space around you and your physical presence to communicate nonverbally as well as verbally. A kinesthetic speaker adjusts their posture, movements, and gestures to create a memorable sensory experience—for instance, they may walk toward the audience at important points of a speech, or spread their arms wide to indicate openness. Research suggests that audience members are more likely to adopt and apply the ideas of a speaker if they present ideas kinesthetically.

Appeal to the Audience: How to Connect Your Idea to Their Desires