Who’s Out There?

The first rule of communications is Know Thy Audience, without fooling yourself into believing that you really know them. They’ll all be different, all the time, and they’ll also change constantly. A communication program needs to give them options.

Some people want to see things in writing and others want to hear them spoken in a human voice. Some people like words, and some want to see pictures. Some want a lot of supporting detail, and others want just the highlights. (In fact, some people will assume you’re hiding something if you use too many facts and figures.)

Assuming your audience is comprised entirely of human beings, they’ll have at least one thing in common. Every person out there will be most interested in how your message touches them. They won’t necessarily have a hidden agenda, but they will have an inner agenda.

It’s not possible to provide genuinely personalized mass message delivery, in which every member of your audience hears a pitch that’s been crafted just for them. We can do it in one-on-one conversations, but not with a mass audience. Not yet, anyway.

However, it’s still a good idea to consider an audience along conventional demographic lines, and think about how each of its major segments connects to the message being delivered. It’s important to understand the different ears that are out there, and then to hear how the message sounds from the audience side.

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