Body Language Communications Are Great for Augmenting Messages
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.
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.
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
Always 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.
Get ready for taking the stage.
Need some help in building better
customer trust from your customer engagement? Creative ideas to help grow your
customer relationships?
All you get is what you bring to the fight. And that fight
gets better every day you learn and apply new ideas.
When things are not what you want them to be, what’s most important is your next step.
Test. Learn. Improve. Repeat.
Are you devoting enough energy to improving your continuous
learning for yourself and your team?
Mike Schoultz is the founder of Digital Spark Marketing, a digital marketing and customer service agency. With 40 years of business experience, he blogs on topics that relate to improving the performance of your business. Find him on Twitter, and LinkedIn.
Digital Spark Marketing will stretch your thinking and your ability to adapt to change. We also provide some fun and inspiration along the way.
