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- How to close with impact
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How to close with impact
Find yourself ending a presentation with ‘that’s all I had to say’? What about a social media post that just ends, without a clear ask of the person reading? You are leaving something on the table when you don’t close with impact. You should be intentional about how you end everything you do – it’s always a conversation and you will create more engagement, build stronger relationships and win more business if you get it right.
You might be thinking of needing a call to action – you probably hear it all the time. But it shouldn’t always be a call to ‘action’. You might just be informing them of something, which might require reflection, or you want the audience to add their view, or ask questions. The key to any close is to make it all about your audience – they only care what is in it for them, not what they can do for you. Help them, be generous and you will trigger great results for you and your business.
The typical end point is asking for something – questions, feedback, a decision, to buy a product. If you want something from your audience, ask them in the middle of your presentation. If using this tactic via social media, only ask for something every 1 in 10 posts. Make your ending audience centric. This will spike your engagement, conversations and relationships as a result. Let’s dive into the three ‘calls’ you can make to end your communications effectively.
Call to action
This is what marketeers talk about all of the time. It is also usually meant in the context of ‘buy our product’, or ‘give us your email address’ but this is not helpful when it is the only ‘call’ you make. I would consider this being a ‘request call’. Request calls should not be used very often – making it all about you is not a good business decision. It’s the way to get zero engagement and low traction. Instead your call to actions should be:
Clear to understand
Easy to implement
Be achievable without too much effort
In the context of public speaking, a call to action could be to deliver a nano speech. In the context of exercise it could be to put your trainers on (which makes you more likely to go for a walk or a run). A call to action should be a simple action that someone can take without too much friction so that they get started. This could even be followed up with a step 2. A series of steps is a great way to get someone hooked on your process and turn them into true fans.
Call to conversation
Creating a two-way dialogue between you and your audience is a fast relationship builder. When you have relationships with your audience, they are more likely to reach back out to you, and you can gather some data on audience pain points which will help you add more value to them in the next engagement.
Consider your call to conversation to be asking for their view on a topic. For example, if you are writing a book on business, you might have several chapters you want to write. You can share your topics and ask the audience what would they add to the list? This gives you great data from people who are in your target market so you can better understand how to help them. At the same time as being involved in the conversation, it is giving them an opportunity to be heard and to share their pain points.
Calls for conversation is your data capture tool which feeds well into the third tool to close with impact.
Call to engage
Sometimes you need your audience to engage with you directly to recapture attention, land a message more effectively, or to scale your reach. This can be done in the form of a poll, or by surprising them with something completely different. In Effortless Public Speaking, Derek and I talked about turning the screen off, because who does that? It’s an attention grabber which creates a call for engagement – either you are going to ask them to do something so they need to pay attention, or you are engaging them so that you can deliver your most important message.
Create something attention grabbing that shifts all of their focus to you, giving them no choice but to engage because it is so captivating. This is seen all the time on social media with the ‘like, follow, share’ type of request, and it can be this but better. How can you be so compelling that your audience are tripping over themselves to engage? This can’t be anything product related, and it must be about them.
This could be combined with your call to conversation to supercharge relationship building with your audience and customers.
Actionable takeaways
Make your call to actions about the audience, not about you, your product, or your business. They only care what is in it for them.
Create call to conversations to build relationships and turn a one way communication into a two way dialogue. Conversations create wins.
Use calls for engagement to supercharge your impact through delivering the key messages at the peak point of audience attention.
That's all for today!
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Liam Sandford