No More Distractions: Engaging an Audience at Corporate Events

The average human attention span now sits at 8.25 seconds according to Samba Recovery, an American addiction treatment center.

This means that we are now increasingly easily distracted and disconnected from whatever we take part in if we lack enough interest to retain our focus.

So what does this mean for corporate events?

Your events now need to be optimized to maximize the focus of your audience giving them a better understanding of your brand.

One of the best ways to maximize focus is by constantly keeping your audience engaged. And while it is impossible to keep everyone fully engaged throughout the entire event, you can still do a lot to max out your audience’s levels of engagement.

Keep reading-let me tell you what you can do to keep your audience engaged for as long as possible.

Why Does Engagement Matter?

Corporate events are extremely important for your business as we wrote about in one of our previous articles, How Corporate Events Influence Business Success. 

However, your success is all dependent on how well you reach your audience at the function-how much they are able to take home from the function.

Therefore to maximize how much information your audience retains from corporate events-you should start by increasing their engagement levels.

Here’s how.

Understand Your Audience

It all starts with understanding your audience.

You need to make sure that you’re not trying to engage an audience of university students in the same way that you’d engage an audience of 50 year old business people.

So if you want to successfully engage your audience, start by understanding their demographics, common interests, reasons for attending your events, and whatever other information you can collect about them.

You can then use this data to make informed decisions on what activities to plan, how to set up the program, as well as what you need to deliver maximum audience satisfaction.

Hype Up Your Event

Another way to increase engagement is to hype up your event before it takes place.

Hype creates excitement within the audience and gives them a positive anticipation of the event so that as they attend it, they are constantly alert and attentive-ready to have their excitement satisfied.

This is most effectively done digitally due to how quickly and efficiently you can share guarantees, fun activities, and all sorts of plans you have associated with your event to get your audience excited.

Beware not to bait your audience though. If you make a promise, you have to deliver on it.

Event Space

This part is usually overlooked by event planners but can actually be very influential in determining how engaged your audience at a corporate event is.

As humans, we always look for the easy way to do things. Therefore if you make it easier for your audience to lose focus than to stay focused at your corporate event, guess what they’ll do?

They’ll get distracted and engagement plummets.

Don’t worry, this works the other way as well and is actually quite easy to implement.

All you have to do is lay out your event space to make it easy for your audience to remain engaged. 

Tables facing the center stage keep everyone’s eyes fixated on the main event, round tables will increase your audience’s engagement at the table for a more networking centered event.

There’s so much more that you can do to leverage your event space so that it pushes for audience engagement.

Chat Them Up

Once your audience shows up to the event, you need to get them connected to others and if possible yourself as soon as possible.

It’s so much easier to retain your focus when you feel comfortable and at ease in the environment.

So to increase your audience’s comfortability, get them talking to each other and avail the speakers at the event for conversation if possible.

This will create the foundations of engagement and connection between you and your audience making your job easier-all you have to do is keep them interested throughout the event now.

Make It Fun

Keeping an audience interested is actually quite simple if you properly understand them beforehand.

Of course, different types of audiences are interested in different things. Once you figure out your audience though, you can do a bit of research on previous events similar to yours and how they kept their audience engaged.

Try implementing interesting activities before, during, and after the event. 

You could also help speakers adjust their tone and add things like humor and stories when addressing the audience, keeping them awake and boosting engagement.

Give Them A Voice

When you give someone a voice at an event, you give them an opportunity to add their own personal opinion to a certain discussion.

This can be used to increase your audience engagement as it empowers them to put their brain to work in deciding their stand on a matter as they form a unique perspective.

Keeping your audience’s brain constantly running means that they are able to retain focus for longer periods of time as well as feel engaged at the event as they are given an opportunity to generate their own point of view about a topic.

It’s All In The Bag

So now that you have a few ideas in the bag, you can start implementing some of them with any corporate event you have coming up. 

The best way to stand out is to add your own twist to any method of engaging your audience to make it seem as original as possible.

I understand that engaging an audience may be the least of your worries for a few of you as you’re held back at square one-contemplating how to even plan and host a corporate event.

In that case, check out our Ultimate guide to Corporate Event Planning.

But if you’d prefer to get experienced professional event planners behind your function idea instead, find out more about what Tellit Events can do below to bring that spark in your mind to life.