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7 things you absolutely, positively need to know about your audience

Posted in: Audience, Content, Design, Information Architecture, PreDesign, by: Mario Garcia

Mar 09, 2009
12:47 AM

A few years back we were offered the opportunity to pitch DHL on a redesign of their intranet. During our preliminary predesign stage we learned quite a bit about their audience (their employees) and what they cared about.

We presented an intranet strategy that was quite different from their existing one, offering more depth in the areas of health, family, personal finance and leisure, and less to company news and information. As I finished my presentation, I waited as they spoke to each other in German.  Finally, one of the intranet editors cleared his throat, clearly concerned, and asked, “But how do you know our employees don’t care as much about company news?” My answer was so obvious that I still can’t believe they were shocked. “I asked them.”

Maybe it was as surprising to them, the communications staff at DHL, as it was to me that they did not know their audience at all. The result was an ineffective employee communication plan and practically zero traffic to their intranet site.

The makeup of those you seek to engage is important to every communication decision you’ll make, whether editorial, design, marketing or distribution related. Everything starts with audience. The more you know about them, the better you will communicate with them. And no communication project should begin without knowing these 7 things about your audience:

1. Who are they?

Okay. This is an obvious one. But you’d be surprised how often I’m clearing dust off a market-research file a client has handed me. This is “data.” Even typing that word out is boring. Age, race, sex, religion, political affiliations. The stuff we think we know, but ignore anyway. If your research is more than 3 years old, do it again. Have a profile of your typical visitor. For example, Under Armour’s audience is athletes and aspiring athletes between the ages of 9 and 24.

2. How many different classes are there?

The amount of classes in a particular audience segment can influence your communication strategy, perhaps creating vertical solutions to communicate to those classes or segments of your audience. I recommend creating as many unique classes as possible and asking all these questions of each class. Back to our Under Armour example, one of their classes is college equipment managers. College equipment managers have a different set of interests and motivations than a 10-year-old little leaguer.

3. What do they know?

Specifically, what do they already know in the areas you want to communicate to them? When we were working with The Miami Herald a few years ago one of the audience stats that stood out to us was the 62% Hispanic population in the city. Yet, every December the newspaper would put together a piece about how Hispanics celebrated Christmas. This made sense in the 1950s when the Hispanic population was less than 5% and a predominantly Jewish audience was interested in reading about how different cultures celebrated the holidays, but in 2002 The Miami Herald was telling a majority of their readers what they already knew, making that story less interesting.

4. What do they need to know?

There’s that saying, “don’t tell me what I know, tell me what I need to know.” In this day and age of information overload, it couldn’t ring more true. The answer to this question may be one thing or many things, but the better you know this answer the more relevant you become to your audience. On a recent web project for an online university asking this revealed that their audience needed to know this was a real university and not a diploma factory. They also needed to know how this university compared to other online universities when it came to curriculum and tuition. These “need to knows” became the basis for the editorial direction of the entire web site.

5. What do they listen to?

I don’t mean just what’s on their ipod, although that wouldn’t hurt either. We need to know what else gets their attention. What sites do they frequent? Which magazines do they read? What’s their favorite TV show? Having an indication of what gets and keeps their attention can be very helpful as you develop your own communication to compete for their time.

6. What’s their pain?

What do they worry about? This is what those late night infomercials pry on—your worries. What do most of those products focus on? Your health. Your money. Your hairline. The stains on your carpet. What the products in those informercials offer is value. A solution to what troubles you. There should always be value to the audience in what you’re communicating to them. They’ll pay attention if they know they will get something out of it. To fill this gap, you need to know what troubles them. In our research for DHL, we found out employees worried about spending more time with their families. They worried about their health, how much money they were spending, their place in the company. Building a content plan that offered advice and relevant information on these topics generated more interest.

7. How tech savvy are they?

One of the considerations web designers loved to ignore in the infancy of the web was the technical limitations in creating web sites. And while the evolution of the web has eliminated many of those limitations, there still are personal and geographic technical limitations that must be considered in every communication plan. For instance, an aggressive, smart social media campaign will not be effective if your audience is not the type to have profiles on sites like Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn. I recently added this question to this list after an experience working on a redesign in India, where more than 90% of this client’s audience was still using Internet Explorer 6 as a browser. I think we all know the limitations of that browser, but to say the least, this information had quite an impact on many of our design decisions. It’s important to note that not having a technically savvy audience doesn’t necessarily mean that you don’t use certain media to communicate to them. It just means that you may have to educate them on the different ways they can communicate with you.

Conclusion

Knowing your audience helps you put yourself in their place. Putting yourself in the place of the audience is the best way to approach a communication project. Too many times I’m finding writers writing for writers, editors editing for editors and designers designing for designers, all the while losing sight of the one thing that matters most - the audience.

Only in understanding your audience and what motivates them will you be able to engage them. Understanding them is more than looking at market data and assuming behaviors. It’s taking the time to talk to them and finding the answers to these very important questions. So, what are you waiting for? Ask them.