Hook Your Audience With a Powerful Opening

The moment you open your mouth to deliver a presentation, things can go one of two ways: either you get your audience to sit up and take notice, or you lose them to their daydreams, phones, and to-do lists.

Openings are critical to your success because they set the tone for the rest of your presentation. In a world where attention spans run short, your listeners will quickly check out if you haven’t put some serious thought into your first few words. If you capture your audience’s attention right out of the gate, they will stay tuned in and want to hear more.

Why Openings Are Key

It doesn’t matter if you’re giving a formal talk or just a brief presentation at work, your opening line needs to be relatable — something that creates an instant connection with your audience. It could be funny, shocking, inviting, serious, or insightful. Whatever it is, it needs to evoke an emotional response from the audience.

Why is this important? When your audience feels something toward you, they’ve made an emotional investment in you and your presentation. Get them invested early, and they will stick with you until the end.

Keep these do’s and don’ts in mind for powerful openings that will hook your audience and keep them on the line.

Do’s

The more you can engage your audience with emotion, the more they will hang onto your every word. Here are a few emotion-based openings that can be the hook you need to keep all eyes and ears on you:

• State a shocking fact. For example, if you’re talking about how to improve your sales numbers, you might open with, “We’re losing money.” Or if you’re showing how to save money on energy bills, you might say, “You’re throwing away $200 a month.”
• Open with a quote. Quotes are effective because they’re short, memorable, and relatable. The quote could be surprising, controversial, inspirational, shocking, sad — essentially, it should be something that sparks the feeling in your audience that you want them to have.
• Tell a story about a personal experience. Examples could be a story about how you overcame an obstacle in your life, or how you failed at something but then learned from it to succeed later. Make it related to the topic of your presentation.
• Ask a question. “How many people here have ever …?” or “What would your life be like if …?” You fill in the blanks to ask a powerful question that gets people thinking.
• Make a bold statement. Do you have an unpopular opinion about something? Something controversial to say? A statement that generates curiosity, urgency, or another emotional response? Bold statements are great hooks to get your audience to sit up and listen.
• Elicit the audience’s imagination. “Imagine a world without hunger, a world where food is plentiful and not reliant on the climate. Imagine a world where no one goes hungry, and famine and malnutrition are extinct.” Get them to imagine the possibilities.

Don’ts

If you’ve ever sat through an opening based on rational thinking, you know that rational-based openings fall flat. They tend to state the obvious and do nothing to engage the audience. With that in mind, don’t open a presentation by:

• Telling them your name. It’s probably on the slide behind you, and you’re wasting everyone’s time if you say it again.
• Saying “Good morning” or “Welcome.” The person before you probably said this, as will the person after you. Be original and memorable instead.
• Reading the title of your presentation. Again, it’s on the slide behind you or in the audience’s agenda that they already have.
• Telling the audience why they are there. There’s no need to recap what people already know — they are there to hear your presentation.
• Telling the audience what you’re going to talk about. They already know. Your job is to give them a reason to listen, and that reason needs to become apparent as soon as you open your mouth.
• Including an agenda slide. As we wrote in this article, agendas are not a “hook” that will capture your audience’s attention.

Final Thoughts

After your precisely written “hook,” you will want every slide that follows to reinforce the message with a strong headline that builds on the previous slide while foreshadowing what’s to come. Just like the opening, the slides should provide a newsworthy snippet that moves your presentation forward without overwhelming the audience with words or graphics.

Put it all together, and you have a memorable presentation that doesn’t bore your audience but instead gets them engaged.