Ideas for Engaging Customers: Ready to interact with your audience? Here are a few ideas to help start the creative process and make the audience feel like a unique group.

1. Feedback. Simply have members acknowledge what you just said – such as, “Does this idea sound promising, Fred?” Hand-raising, filling out cards, shouting out answers or talking back – these response techniques all involve the audience.
2. Play to the Back of the Room. It’s easy for presenters to get sucked into only addressing the people in the front row. Involve the people in the back row, and it will have a wave effect of everybody getting involved.
3. Eye contact works. The presenter shouldn’t look over people’s heads. Get off the stage and into the audience. Touch someone’s shoulder, shake hands, pat someone’s back, read name tags to address people personally. All this humanizes the presentation
4. Stand up and be counted. Ask qualifying questions of the audience. The big benefit: Staffers can use those qualifying questions and key in on people who have answered certain questions. Prospects are identifying themselves
5. Guinea pigs. If one of the exhibitor’s key points is to show how simple something is to use, bring up someone from the audience to perform the demonstration or put it together. It’s a lot stronger than having the presenter do it.
6. Joy buzzers. Give the audience electronic controllers to respond to questions. Everybody can respond, and you have immediate results that can be tabulated, analyzed and displayed via computer graphics. These electronic response mechanisms work great with game shows. Instead of having just two contestants up on stage, everybody can play the game.