How Audience Analysis Can Improve Communication
Modern brands build a rapport with clients across many channels. The way you live chat, talk on the phone, and even provide self-service helps build a relationship with each one of your customers, all of whom make up your audience. Communication is essential in customer relations because every interaction is a conversation. That’s why audience analysis should play a crucial role in your communication strategy.
Let’s explore the practice of audience analysis in public speaking and the ways it can be applied to a broader marketing approach to customer communication.
What Is Audience Analysis?
Audience analysis is a practice used in public speaking circles. Speakers at events often start with a self-centric approach—the story they have to tell and the skills they have to teach. However, presenting with just your message in mind is not as powerful—and does not connect with your audience—as creating a presentation with the audience’s perspective, motivations, and even their background frame of reference.
Audience analysis is how speakers understand their public audiences before building a presentation. In fact, this practice is older than digital communication but is uniquely applicable to your entire communication strategy. There are also different types of audience analysis:
- Demographic Analysis
- This involves analyzing the group traits of your audience, such as their general ages, professions, cultural traits, and education.
- Is your group homogeneous or heterogeneous?
- Are you like your audience or different from them?
- Psychological Analysis
- This entails understanding the experiential background and beliefs of your audience.
- What are the motivations and concerns of your audience?
- What does your audience already know?
- What are their shared or differing opinions?
- Situational Analysis
- This type is about exploring the context of the speaking event.
- Why is the audience listening to you today?
- What does the audience hope to learn from you?
- What environment will you be presenting in?
- What kind of experience is expected from you?
Why Is Audience Analysis Important?
So, why should modern brands use audience analysis for more than just sending speakers to events? Because the world is now your audience, and every interaction is a presentation. Every click is an audience member signing up to see what you have to show or learn what you have to teach. Whether your brand sells sports equipment or develops software, your audience is listening.
Are you communicating with them effectively?
Level up Your Relatability
Audience analysis also allows you to level up your brand’s total relatability to customers by building a strategy based on what your audience needs, what they expect, and the principles of putting on a good show.
Why do we make customer avatars if not to analyze the demographics and psychology of our audience?
In fact, the audience analysis method is an existing and well-designed way to take a deeper look at a crowd and speak to all of them more directly, in a way that resonates with them.
Building rapport, earning loyalty, and simply being understood clearly are the rewards of well-applied audience analysis in the speaker circuit and across multiple channels.
How to Analyze an Audience
Analyzing your audience also means discovering more about them. In a world of data privacy, this requires a careful, respectful, and wide-sweeping approach. While a speaker has a guest list to start with, a brand has an entire CRM database and targeted leads to consider. Fortunately, there are many ways to build your knowledge base about individual customers and your audience as a group.
Methods to Gather Information about Your Audience
- Voluntary surveys
- Interviews and testimonials
- Social media research
- Link and search tracking
- Order history and browsing history
- Wish list features
- Account profile settings
Gathering information about your customers and leads can be done directly or indirectly by asking them questions, encouraging community discussions, and learning from preference tools like profile settings and wish lists.
Customer Avatars Meet Audience Analysis
Analyzing your audience can be done with the same tools you might use to conduct market research and develop your customer avatars. Establishing an understanding of your current and target audience can be done by building a composite image of your audience as a homogenous group or in identifiable groups and categories.
Customer avatars also make it possible to visualize your audience groups as one composite person. Audience analysis allows you to take that same information and build a communication strategy beyond the separate pursuits of public speaking and content marketing.
Tips for Applying Your Findings
- Create content that fulfills the customer’s intended purpose.
- Teach them how to do something.
- Help them with a specific problem.
- Answer a question.
- Educate them on an interesting subject.
- Create customer support resources from the audience’s perspective.
- Offer intuitive self-help navigation.
- Implement a conversational FAQ chatbot.
- Empower your customer avatars.
- Better understand your total audience makeup.
- Add psychological and contextual motivations to avatars.
- Host more relatable marketing and brand events.
- Improve the quality of live, virtual, and prepared presentations.
Once you have learned about your audience, how do you turn that analysis into valuable results such as conversions and better customer relationships?
Knowing where your audience comes from can help you speak in a way that relates to them. And understanding what your audience already knows can help you create a knowledge base that is truly useful to them.
You can also integrate audience analysis results into every layer of your communication strategy. In addition to helping you craft a more personal and engaging message, it can help you avoid mistakes in targeting, language, and tone. You can create more complete customer avatars for the marketing and sales teams. Further, you can provide better scripts and solutions for the customer service team.
As for your content marketing, we already know how powerful your choice of language, imagery, and messaging can be when connecting with an audience.
Audience Analysis: What Brands Today Can Learn from Powerful Public Speaking
Whether you want to deliver a rousing speech or launch a product, you must understand your audience. Exercising audience analysis can give you a deeper understanding and allow you to take a more complete approach to communication. Understanding those you’re trying to reach should shape what you say and how you say it.
Your brand’s marketing strategy goes beyond any one channel. Public speaking and social media marketing are not so different. Presenting to an audience as well as preparing an advertising campaign have remarkable similarities—and strategies to learn.
Want to understand your audience better? We can help! Start by requesting a free consultation today.
At Viral Solutions we are committed to seeing YOU succeed. It is our goal to grow your business with proven digital marketing strategies that will help your business for the long haul.
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