If you’re going to achieve amazing things in your life you will need to put on the performance of a life time… literally. If you’re going to put on the performance of a life time, you’d better know your audience. Pretty much anything you do in life involves getting others to succeed. If you want to be a great chef, you’ll need people to eat your food. If you want to be great at sports you’ll need people to compete with. Unless you have an idea to be a hermit living out in the middle of nowhere you’ll need the involvement of others to succeed to some regard.
If you own your own business or you have a job, you have to have clients, fans, followers, spectators, and patrons. It’s the both people you are aiming to serve and the people you report to. If you want the best reaction from your audience you need to know who they are and what “makes them tick”. You should aim to establish a genuine interest with your followers and connect with them.
Questions to Identify Your Audience:
The following questions aim to help you identify your followers, clients, fans, spectators, and patrons.
- Who makes up your audience?
- What is their background?
- What are their demographic profiles?
- What problems do they have?
- What solutions are they seeking?
- What desires do they have?
- What do they value?
- How do they communicate?
- What current knowledge do they have?
- Where can you reach them?
- When is the best time to connect with them?
- Why do they become your audience?
In the land of music if you are a heavy metal artist and try to play for a crowd that likes country music, it won’t go over very well. The same for the reverse.
Knowing the answers to the questions above is a good start to understanding your audience and being able to make a good connection with them. You will know what they want and it will help you to aim to give them what they want. Showing that you’re there to respond to their needs can turn your audience into raving fans.
It’s almost a given that you will have more than one audience in your life, so you will need to identify each audience and develop audience profiles for each group by answering the questions provided above.
Benefits of Identifying Your Audience:
- Get your message across more clearly
- Build better trust and rapport
- Achieve an improved response to your message
Add Value to Your Audience:
One critically important thing to consider is Add Value to your audience. When you have an audience and they give you their time, aim to Add Value to your audience. In order to do that properly it is important to know what they are seeking. It could be knowledge, entertainment, intellectual stimulation. Whatever it is, once you determine what they want, if you can give it to them, you will turn your audience into fans. If you don’t work on giving your audiences what they want, you risk loosing that audience to another venue.
Have you ever attended an event where the presenter presented such basic information that at the end of the presentation you hadn’t picked up anything new and thought, “Well, that was a complete waste of time!” Then you talk to others in the audience and they agree. I’m pretty sure you have experienced that, unfortunately it happens more often than it should. If the presenter would have taken the time and made the effort to better understand their audience they could have prepared a presentation that was targeted to the audiences knowledge level and also provided added value.
Be Genuine and Sincere:
Changing your methods of delivery to your audience is natural when you know who they are and how to communicate with them. Take a minute to think about how you change your tone, words and delivery when you talk to different people or groups of people. For example you may talk one way with your family, another with your colleagues, a different way with your friends and totally unique way with small children.
What efforts do you take to build a rapport or connect with your audience?
