Don’t Take Your Audience For Granted!

A common mistake made by business and political leaders is to make assumptions about their audience. They do not take the time to research to find out who they are and what they should be saying to them. Effective communications starts with good audience analysis. It is impossible to effectively communicate to people without understanding their context, point of view and overall sentiment. Especially with regard to issues or events that are of common interest to the speaker and the recipient.

This principle applies in many contexts. It could be when giving an important speech or when working with important stakeholders or groups of people on a complex project. Communication is about influence and persuasion and to achieve desired outcomes, there must be some intentionality of purpose.

The following #tips give a rundown of the importance of audience insights in communication.

OBJECTIVES AND OUTCOMES

It is important to determine from the onset, what success looks like, in terms of the intiative, event or activity that you are embarking upon. Think about what your high level goals are and the desired outcomes in terms of what you want the audience to know and do; and how you would like them to feel about your communication or engagement. Having a think about this ahead of time, would go a long way to ensuring that your approach is fit-for-purpose.

SEGMENT

If you are likely to be speaking to a broad or diverse audience, then it is important to find out who they are and categorize them. It may even be an audience of 7 members of a Board with distinct or divergent interests. Segmenting them based on age, gender, perspectives, length of tenure on the board, history of relationship with key players etc would be useful to determining what kind of message is likely to resonate with them or otherwise. The more data and insights to guide the audience segmentation, the more effective your strategy and approach is likely to be. The one thing to never do is to go into an engagement or communication initiative blind i.e. without any pre-event insights on who you are speaking to and how they are likely to receive the message that you are bringing forward.

INTEREST & INFLUENCE

Depending on what is at stake, it is important to have a view on the levels of interest within specific demographics of identified audience groups. This would ensure that your messaging is tailored to the interests of your audience and also designed to achieve your goals. Many leaders make the mistake of talking at and not to people. In order to effectively communicate with people, you must have a good level of understanding about who they are, what their value drivers are; what is close to their hearts and what their interests and motivations are on issues of common interest. Audience insights are critical to the success of any brand, marketing, communications or issues management effort. Under-estimating the interest and/or influence of an audience group can be a costly error in a political or business context.

MESSAGE

Messages should always be tailored to the audience. The language and tone should be carefully crafted in such a way that the intended purpose of the communication is achieved. It is unwise to have a one-size-fits-all approach to communication, when it is clear that audiences have different perspectives on similar issues and levels of interest and influence vary. E.g Communicating with an audience that has a low level of interest on an issue is completely different from doing so with a highly engaged and informed audience. The level of detail required to engage with the latter group would be more than that of the former.

PLATFORM

Audience insights would also help determine the best format or platform to engage or communicate with the target group(s). For instance, if an audience is Gen Z, it makes no sense to schedule communications on a social media platform like Facebook ( largely used by older generations in the 50+ age range.) Audience insights would also help to determine how the target group consumes information and the best medium through which they are best engaged e.g digital or in person, small or large groups, presentation slides, speech or fireside chat etc.

In all cases, getting a strong sense about your audience is the most effective way to ensure that your communication lands as intended and achieves the desired outcomes.