Feelings and emotions do have a critical role in your marketing messages, don’t they? And body language communications will contribute significantly to those feelings and emotions.
What does your body language say? Does it say you’re confident, smart, and enthusiastic—or quiet or insecure?
Here is an interesting fact to keep in mind. Only a small percentage of communication involves actual words: 7%, to be exact. In fact, 55% of communication is visual (body language, eye contact) and 38% is vocal (pitch, speed, volume, tone of voice). The world’s best business communicators have strong body language: a commanding presence that reflects confidence, competence, and charisma.
So here are 10 ways you can augment your messages with strong body language communication:
Draw attention
Use visual descriptions as examples to help people understand your key points. It will help them be remembered better.
Eye to eye
Always, always look people directly in the eye. For large groups select several people in the audience to look at. Engage them with your eyes.
Use facial expressions explicitly
Reflect passion and generate empathy with the listener by using soft, gentle, and aware facial expressions. As much as possible avoid negative facial expressions, such as frowns or raised eyebrows. What is or isn’t negative is dependent on the context, including cultural context, so be guided by your situation.
Pause
If you have been asked a hard question or you want a different way to draw attention, simply pause. Pay attention to your breathing … slow breaths.
Be natural
Even if you were to succeed in controlling your body language “by the book,” you would look fake. While there are certain aspects of body language that can be improved upon to create a more effective message, you still need to act like yourself and not be robotic.
Vary your gestures
Avoid being stiff and unemotional. Vary your gestures to remain personal and real.
Direct gestures toward the audience.
Direct gestures let you more clearly indicate a favorable outcome to the listener. Direct the most negative gestures away from yourself and the listener. Clearly indicate that you wish that no obstacle stands in the way of your intended message.
Get buy-in
Get your audience agreeing with you by using positive gestures like nodding in agreement, smiling, and using open gestures. away
Smile
A basic must do. Puts your audience at ease.
Encourage participation
Use open gestures and walk around and towards the group naturally.
So do are you sending the unspoken messages that you are intending to send? It does make a difference. No one is born with this skill … it takes lots of focused practice. Dive in today and notice your body language communication improvements.
Remember this simple fact. The body language communication influence you have on others is usually way beyond what you imagined it to be. Let it be your difference-maker.
The bottom line
What we found most interesting in this concept is its simplicity. Making the simple complicated is commonplace … but making the complicated simple, awesomely simple is real creativity!
Lots of ideas are being generated and the process is definitely great at customer engagement. We believe its success will generate more business experimentation in communications.
In summary, remember that people communicate with people …, not brands or businesses. It’s all about social communications and relationship building.
It’s important to make the distinction between a digital strategy that involves social platforms and a true social strategy. For a social strategy to succeed, simply joining the conversation is not enough. You must lead it.
