How to Understand Your Audience in order to Make Informed Content Decisions in 3 Easy Ways
Deciding on the right content
A poorly informed content decision risks losing or confusing your audience. And it can undermine your chances of achieving your purpose and supporting your overall business outcome.
This applies whether you’re writing a short email, video script, document or delivering a presentation. And any other type of comms.
Before taking time to understand your audience, make sure you have clarified your purpose and know how it supports your business outcome.
This will help frame the process for understanding your audience.
There is a lot you can do to understand your audience. However, there are three easy ways to understand your audience that will set you on a great path to make informed content decisions to create excellent comms:
- Needs, attitudes and wants
- Education or experience level
- Best media
Let’s take a look at these and discover why they can help you make informed content decisions.
Learn your audience’s needs, attitudes and wants
Let’s say there’s only time for one thing to understand your audience. Then this is what you must do: learn what your audience’s needs, attitudes, and wants are.
To understand why to let’s first look at each of these elements:
- Needs are what you must have before you can do something meaningful for yourself.
For example, I may need to have a car so that I can drive to work. It doesn’t matter what car, just so long as it can get from A to B.
If I don’t have this car, I can’t get to work. So it’s, without doubt, a need.
- Attitude refers to your general outlook on a particular subject.
The focus of this attitude can be towards the subject of the comms piece you are about to develop. Or just your general state of things in life – either at work or home.
The attitude can be positive, neutral or negative.
- Wants refer to something you would like to have but don’t need to have
This is best understood in contrast to a need. For example, I might want to have a $100k Tesla car to drive to work. But I only need a vehicle (such as a Honda Jazz) to get me to work.
Why is this information so important?
Give them what they need
An essential part of using content in comms is knowing how to make it compelling. You want to keep it engaging, so your audience gets your whole message. Most discussions around are making your effective comms centre on word choices, phrases, headings and glossy layouts. These are all valuable, but before you get to this point, there’s something else that makes it easy and powerful to create compelling content that gives your audience what they need.
It’s not rocket science. TV and radio have been using that principle to draw big audiences since the beginning of time. When they give their audiences what they want, they get a good rating because people tune in.
Take into account their attitude
Everyone has an attitude that influences how they will receive your message. If you fail to take that into account when delivering your message, you could set up a roadblock to your purpose straight away.
If writing about a new procedure that everyone dislikes in an organisation in an overly optimistic way, you could create cynicism from your audience. Delivering the message neutrally would be more effective.
You can’t choose the best tone to deliver your content if you don’t know your audience’s attitudes.
Give them what they want to build goodwill!
Finally, not everyone gets what they want. That’s a fact of life. But when they do, they’re usually pretty happy as a result and develop a positive attitude.
When it comes to developing comms, it’s not always possible to give your audience what they want. But if you can – do it! This applies to the content you include. You’ll build long standing goodwill.
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