Techniques to make the audience remember your message

Every speaker wants his audience to be able to remember his speech long after they have heard it. This ensures that the message conveyed can be more effective and useful once the speaker's presentation is over. The truth is that in most cases, the percentage of what is remembered by the audience compared to the amount of ideas presented in the speech is significantly low.

All this leads the most experienced speakers to resort to techniques and resources with the aim of making the audience remember the main message more easily, even if they end up forgetting some complementary aspects of lesser importance.

During the development of this session, we will be addressing some of the most important general aspects related to this topic. This will be useful if you want to improve your speeches so that they have a better impact on the audience, achieving a better retention of your message.

Emphasize the main ideas: One of the factors that most hinders the retention of the message by the audience is the difficulty to identify the main ideas of the speech. When we add stories or decorative elements to our speech, it can divert the audience's attention to secondary elements of lesser importance. This does not imply that decorative elements are not important, but that we must highlight where we want to draw the attention of our audience.

There are many ways in which we can highlight the main ideas of the speech. If you are going to use slides, you can use them to list the key points you want to convey. If your presentation does not have this type of resource, use your initial presentation to list the key points to be addressed.

Limit the number of main ideas: Another of the most common mistakes when addressing a speech is to want to cover many points of interest in a single presentation. The more main ideas your speech contains, the more difficult it will be to communicate a message that can be remembered later by the audience. It is recommended that you limit the number of main ideas to a maximum of 3 ideas. This will help you to focus the audience's attention on the key aspects, without drifting into elements that are not transcendental or do not add any value to the speech.

The summary: The summary is the moment of our speech where we review the elements addressed, so that they can be assimilated by the audience more easily. In case part of our audience has distracted their attention during the presentation, they can receive the condensed content before the end of the presentation and make annotations if necessary.

The summary is incorporated in the conclusions of the speech, being one of the fundamental parts of the speech, since it acts as a check for the audience to verify if the message they have received is the one the speaker wants to communicate.

Preparing a summary can be more complex than we think, since you will have to transmit in a few minutes a certain amount of information, for which you have needed a whole presentation.

That said, you will have to make use of your skills to synthesize the content and discern which are the most relevant aspects of it. By making use of this element, it is more likely that our message will be retained more easily, since we manage to communicate the main ideas a second time, but in a simpler and easier to understand way.