BSK: Audience
In this session, we will discuss your Audience and how to define it.
Let's start with why you need to define your audience.
Your message and how it is presented will differ depending on who you're trying to communicate to.
Audiences can be big, like you'll find online, or small, like in a boardroom.
Each audience has different interests, wants different levels of detail, and understands concepts differently.
At a minimum, you'll generally have 3 audiences:
Your team - the people who work with you
Your suppliers - third parties that supply goods or services that help you deliver your end products or services
Your customers - the people you work for, your clients, the people who you're trying to find to pay you money for delivering your product
For any audience you're looking to define, you should look at their interests and try to understand the nuances of that audience. You're trying to understand who they are and what they're interested in knowing, and this will inform your Story (messaging), Positioning, and even the Products you offer.
You'll likely have more than just three audiences.
Take your 'Customer' audience as an example; when you dive deeper, you'll likely have many segments of customers with characteristics that make them different enough to warrant you setting up a new audience group and tailoring your message specifically to them.
For example, you have customers in Melbourne and Sydney. These are two different customer groups because Victoria and New South Wales have different public holiday schedules, which impact when and what you plan to post online.
Some of the characteristics you can explore when developing an audience group or an avatar:
Age range, for example: 18-29
Location, for example: Melbourne and Sydney
Interests, for example, fishing, health, Star Wars)
Platforms, for example: Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Tik Tok
Wants, for example: "They need help starting their business."
Needs, for example: "a set of instructions and tools to help get started."
Expectations, for example: "professional and approachable brand building system that actually works."
What's an Avatar?
An avatar is a combination of attributes; it's a way of putting a circle around an audience group and labelling its nuances and characteristics with a figurehead.
For example, your audience in Melbourne is represented by the avatar "Jeff," and all of Sydney is represented by the avatar "Stacey.”
You can then dive deeper and have "Stacey's cousin Maranda", who lives in Western Sydney.
As you can see, the process can take many different directions and is a balancing act between being too broad and too specific.
You may have heard of a tool that marketers use called a Customer Journey Map.
A customer journey map aims to understand where people spend their time, what problems they have (also known as pain points), and what means of communication could be used to reach those people. You can even use journey mapping to try and brainstorm new products to offer to a given audience.
Understanding a customer journey can also be a compelling way to assess how someone spends their day, what content they interact with, on which platforms, what their path to purchase is, and so on.
Do you have to create a customer journey map? No, you don't. Sure, it's a great tool for understanding your audience if you want to, but it's not necessary.
It is necessary to identify your audiences, segment them into groups, and understand the nuances of tailoring your message and strategy to each group.
For example - if you're running a cafe in the city, you want to tell city workers about your new coffee and toastie combo via a sign and an Instagram post.
If you sell forensic accounting services and want to work with lawyers, you'll attend events and talk about spreadsheets or other important-sounding businessy stuff.
The point is that who you're trying to talk to will determine what you say, how, and where you say it. Understanding your audience will help you tune your messaging and allocate resources more responsibly.
Knowing your Audience affects how much money you spend.
You can budget better if you know who you're talking to and how elaborate the message needs to be. Going to an expo—doing all the planning and prep work—is a very different level of spending compared to making a PowerPoint presentation and sending an email.
Audiences, Groups, Individuals — Regardless of the size, there are some key questions to think about:
Who are you talking to?
What language do they speak? Their preferred style of communication.
What information do they need?
Where do they get their information?
How do we need to communicate to them? Via which channels? Online, digital? In person?
Where do they spend their time?
When do people need your product?
That's the audience - see you on the next one.
Last Updated: 22/May/2024