3 Getting to Know Your Audience

Framing the Audience Analysis

The communications landscape changes rapidly over time, but one criterion for successful communication remains the same: the importance of knowing who your audience is and understanding their needs. Imagine you want to give a presentation to people in your department at work. You likely know your colleagues’ personalities and what they expect of you. You might know their education levels and you are sure they understand all of your company-specific jargon. You think delivering your message should be easy, except many of them are so comfortable with you, they decide to skip your presentation because you took for granted that they would be interested. On the other hand, if you had to present to the board of directors, you might need to do more homework on who they are and what they expect from you. In other words, it is always important to get to know your audience as much as possible to give yourself the best chance at communicating successfully.

In this chapter you will begin to examine differences between primary, secondary, and hidden audiences. Then, using the AUDIENCE acronym as a tool, you will participate in activities that will help you flesh out information you need to know about your audience in order to persuade, inform, or entertain them. You will have at least three chances to practise your audience analysis skills and get peer feedback. Then, near the end of this chapter, you will craft a message that considers your audience’s needs and expectations. This process will lay the foundation for you to become a communicator who is effective in persuading, informing, or entertaining an audience because you have done your best work in getting to know them, their needs, and expectations first.

Identifying Your Primary, Secondary, and Hidden Audiences

Your audience is the person or people you want to communicate with. By knowing more about them (their wants, needs, values, etc.), you are able to better craft your message so that they will receive it the way you intended.

Your success as a communicator partly depends on how well you can tailor your message to your audience.

Your primary audience is your intended audience; it is the person or people you have in mind when you decide to communicate something. However, when analyzing your audience you must also beware of your secondary audience. These are other people you could reasonably expect to come in contact with your message. For example, you might send an email to a customer, who, in this case, is your primary audience, and copy (cc:) your boss, who would be your secondary audience. Beyond these two audiences, you also have to consider your hidden audience, which are people who you may not have intended to come in contact with your audience (or message) at all, such as a colleague who gets a forwarded copy of your email.

A Tool for Analyzing Your Audience

To help you get to know your audience even more, we will begin by working through a set of steps that, together, spell the acronym AUDIENCE. These steps will give you an idea of what questions to ask and what information can be useful in better connecting with your audience.

A = Analyze. Who is/are the recipients of your message?

U = Understand. What is their knowledge about your intended message?

D = Demographics. What is their age, gender, education level, position?

I = Interest. What is their level of interest/investment in your message (What’s in it for them?)

E = Environment. What setting/reality is your audience immersed in, and what is your relationship to it? What is their likely attitude to your message? Have you taken cultural differences into consideration?

N = Need. What information does your audience need?

C = Customize. How do you adjust your message to your audience?

E = Expectations. What are your audience’s expectations?

These categories of information have been assembled into a job aid to help you conduct your very own audience analyses. As you review the tool, list the traits that apply to you for each section. If you would like to expand this reflection, consider how you might fill this tool out with traits that apply to you in your personal life versus your worklife. What are some methods you might use to find out more about an audience?

For your audience analysis, choose one of the scenarios and fill out the following form. Submit it according to your instructor’s directions.

Now let us take a look at putting this tool to use in a scenario. Read Straight Outta Sunnyvale: Yahoo manager gone after racially-charged e-mail and reflect on these questions regarding his email:

1. Who was the primary audience for his original email?
2. Who was the secondary audience?
3. Who was the hidden audience?
4. Assuming he did an audience analysis, was it effective? Why or why not?
5. What elements of AUDIENCE might he have considered in advance to get a better outcome?

The Purpose of Your Message

When you communicate with an audience, you are normally trying to achieve one or more of the three following broad outcomes:

1. Persuade – convince your audience to do something or take some action
2. Inform – raise their awareness and/or understanding about a situation or issue
3. Entertain – capture their attention in order to distract and delight
   

Here are two possible use cases where analyzing your audience will help you improve your communication:

1. You can complete an analysis to make sure you understand your audience comprehensively before you begin crafting your message. This ensures your message has the best chance at landing properly with your audience.
2. Take an existing message and use your analysis to better customize the message.

Can you think of others? In both of our suggested use cases, the AUDIENCE tool provides a framework to identify key factors you should consider when creating, revising, or reviewing communications.

Conclusion

In this chapter you have learned what an audience is and why an awareness of your audience’s needs and expectations is important to communicating your intended message.

You learned to define primary, secondary, and hidden audiences, and thought about ways to persuade, inform, and/or entertain them. You also used the AUDIENCE tool to examine an audience and begin to recognize when the audience and message are mismatched.

You should now be able to create messages that more effectively match your objective to successfully persuade, inform, or entertain. You are also well-positioned to get more practice and/or move on to the next module topic.

Further Reading

• YouTube video about audience analysis to prepare for a speech or other verbal presentation.
• Audience Analysis web page by David McMurray with a focus on Technical Writing. Provides good guidance on how to effectively adapt (customize) your message to suit your audience.
• Article about getting to know less obvious elements of your audience, such as culture and thought patterns. The focus here is on presentation and provides good activities at the end to test your knowledge using individual and peer exercises.
• Audience Analysis: Primary, Secondary and Hidden Audiences. Supplementary information for primary, secondary, and hidden audiences, along with more information about the AUDIENCE tool. 
  

References

Wollert Hickman, D. (2014). Audience analysis: Primary, secondary, and hidden audiences.

Attribution Statement (Audience)

This chapter is a remix containing content from a variety of sources published under a variety of open licenses, including the following:

Chapter Content

• Original content contributed by the Olds College OER Development Team, of Olds College to Professional Communications Open Curriculum under a CC-BY 4.0 license

Check Your Understandings

• Original assessment items contributed by the Olds College OER Development Team, of Olds College to Professional Communications Open Curriculum under a CC-BY 4.0 license
• Assessment items created by The Saylor Foundation for a Saylor.org course BUS210: Corporate Communication Quiz 1, previously shared under a CC BY 3.0 US license
• Assessment items created by The Saylor Foundation for a Saylor.org course BUS210: Corporate Communication Quiz 2, previously shared under a CC BY 3.0 US license
• Assessment items created by The Saylor Foundation for a Saylor.org course BUS210: Corporate Communication Quiz 4, previously shared under a CC BY 3.0 US license
• Assessment items created by The Saylor Foundation for a Saylor.org course BUS210: Corporate Communication Quiz 6, previously shared under a CC BY 3.0 US license