Deciphering the “Know Your Audience” Mantra – Part One

Those in the communications field have had to pivot their expertise over the past 15 years, and while many thought it would be easy, it turned out it was anything but. 

Many of us remember when media outlets had the upper hand when it came to deciding what they wanted to share, promote and endorse on a given day (and the public relations specialists, corporate communications professionals and event planners of the world had to do everything we could to convince them what they should be focused on).

This process evolved in any number of ways once organizations could bypass the media and get their message directly to the people. However, it came with a price. Organizations had to learn how to engage an audience directly and influence their behavior without alienating or offending by making it sound like advertising. Many thought it would be simple, but quickly learned that the underlying “seal of approval” the media could authentically give couldn’t necessarily be recreated. Audiences weren’t that gullible.

To this day, the idea of knowing your audience confounds companies in every industry. Many know they need to make the effort to do their due diligence on learning who is listening to them (and who isn’t), but even after this effort is completed, the methodology on how they use the data becomes almost stereotypical in nature. They use trite reasoning, assume that different demographics will continue to act and react the same way, and don’t take into account outside factors that could influence their audience’s trust.

Audience engagement starts with a formula: the RIGHT message + the RIGHT tone + the RIGHT channel + RIGHT time. In Part Two, we will discuss some simple ways to use this formula and understand how your audience needs to hear things (as opposed to wants to hear things) in order to be influenced.