How You Can Engage Your Audience

Most speakers, if they are brutally honest, will question how they engage their audience at a conference or a corporate event. And of course they do so for all the right reasons. Because you always want to engage your audience. Since you want your audience to appreciate the material that you provide and you also want a good response to that material. It's natural.

But how do you elicit audience engagement? What are the techniques? How do you know when it’s working?

Well, the good news is it’s not as hard as all as that. So much of it comes from your preparation and planning, your organisation of your material, your use of good examples and case studies and all the simple basics of public speaking. The basics that you will learn with an online course or a corporate training course.

Engage Your Audience in the Style of President Trump

But we ask these questions because of the State of the Union speech that we watched a few weeks back. This was the 2026 State of the Union with Donald Trump speaking in Congress.

The speech itself probably won’t go down in history as an epic. Since it wasn’t brimming with rhetorical devices and its writing wasn’t particularly noteworthy. However, it's already in the record books. At one hour and 47 minutes it was the longest State of the Union address in American history, exceeding the previous record by 20 minutes.

But what we noticed was the use of an audience engagement technique by President Trump.

He asked a question of his audience. And he also asked his audience to stand up if they took one position or to remain seated if they favoured an alternative position. A very effective technique. But in the political sphere, very divisive. The very definition of divisive!

Is it a technique that many politicians would dare to use in the legislative chamber of their own countries? Certainly not.

But this is President Trump. And of course he does things differently.

As a technique he achieved the result he wanted. And all the television stations and social media platforms noted the stance taken by the legislators.

When you need more examples of public speaking speeches and presentations, you will find plenty of top public speaking tips and also presentation tips on this site. And when you need to hone your skills that bit further for a big event, then you can always enroll on an online public speaking course at your convenience. Plus when you are ready to train your entire team on their public speaking skills you’ll find a corporate public speaking training course is the ideal way to achieve this objective. Please do not hesitate to get in touch.