Planning Messages

Audience Analysis

John Thill and Courtland Bovee, two leading authors in the field of business communication, have created a checklist for planning business messages. The following twelve-item checklist, adapted here, serves as a useful reminder of the importance of preparation in the writing process:

Source: Melissa Ashman, https://pressbooks.bccampus.ca/professionalcomms/chapter/3-3-audience-analysis-overview/
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 License.

Audience Types

Identifying your Primary, Secondary, and Hidden Audiences

Your audience is the person or people you want to communicate with. By knowing more about them (their wants, needs, values, etc.), you are able to better craft your message so that they will receive it the way you intended.

Your success as a communicator partly depends on how well you can tailor your message to your audience.

Your primary audience is your intended audience; it is the person or people you have in mind when you decide to communicate something. However, when analyzing your audience, you must also beware of your secondary audience. These are other people you could reasonably expect to come in contact with your message. For example, you might send an email to a customer, who, in this case, is your primary audience, and copy (cc:) your boss, who would be your secondary audience. Beyond these two audiences, you also have to consider your hidden audience, which are people who you may not have intended to come in contact with your audience (or message) at all, such as a colleague who gets a forwarded copy of your email.

Audience Demographics

There are social and economic characteristics that can influence how someone behaves as an individual. Standard demographic variables include a person's age, gender, family status, education, occupation, income, and ethnicity. Each of these variables or characteristics can provide clues about how a person might respond to a message.

For example, people of different ages consume (use) media and social media differently. According to the Pew Research Center (2018), 81 percent of people aged 18-29 use Facebook, 64 percent use Instagram, and 40 percent use Twitter. In contrast, 65 percent of people aged 50-64 use Facebook, 21 percent use Instagram, and 19 percent use Twitter (Pew Research Center, 2018). If I were trying to market my product to those aged 50-64, I would likely reach a larger audience (and potentially make more sales) if I used targeted ads on Facebook rather than recruiting brand ambassadors on Instagram. Knowing the age (or ages) of your audience(s) can help inform what channels you use to send your message. It can also help you determine the best way to structure and tailor your message to meet specific audience characteristics.

Audience Geographics

We all understand geographically defined political jurisdictions such as cities, provinces, and territories. You can also geographically segment audiences into rural, urban, suburban, and edge communities (the office parks that have sprung up on the outskirts of many urban communities). These geographic categories help define rifts between regions on issues such as transportation, education, taxes, housing, land use, and more. These are important geographic audience categories for politicians, marketers, and businesses.

For example, local retail advertisers want to reach audiences who are in the reading or listening range of the local newspaper or radio station and within traveling distance of their stores. Therefore, it's important to consider the geographic characteristics of your audience when crafting business messages.

Audience Psychographics

Psychographics refer to all the psychological variables that combine to form a person's inner self. Even if two people share the same demographic or geographic characteristics, they may still hold entirely different ideas and values that define them personally and socially. Some of these differences are explained by looking at the psychographic characteristics that define them.  Psychographic variables include:

Motives – an internal force that stimulates someone to behave in a particular manner. A person has media consumption motives and buying motives. A motive for watching television may be to escape; a motive for choosing to watch a situation comedy rather than a police drama may be the audience member's need to laugh rather than feel suspense and anxiety.

Attitudes – a learned predisposition, a feeling held toward an object, person, or idea that leads to a particular behavior. Attitudes are enduring; they are positive or negative, affecting likes and dislikes. A strong positive attitude can make someone very loyal to a brand (one person is committed to the Mazda brand, so they will only consider Mazda models when it is time to buy a new car). A strong negative attitude can turn an audience member away from a message or product (someone disagrees with the political slant of Fox News and decides to watch MSNBC instead).

Personalities – a collection of traits that make a person distinctive. Personalities influence how people look at the world, how they perceive and interpret what is happening around them, how they respond intellectually and emotionally, and how they form opinions and attitudes.

Lifestyles – these factors form the mainstay of psychographic research. Lifestyle research studies the way people allocate time, energy, and money.

Adapting Messages

Let's say you have analyzed your audience until you know them better than you know yourself. What good is it? How do you use this information? How do you keep from writing something that will still be incomprehensible or useless to your readers?

The business of writing to your audience may have a lot to do with inborn talent, intuition, and even mystery. But there are some controls you can use to have a better chance of connecting with your readers. The following "controls" mostly have to do with making information more understandable for your specific audience:

• Add information readers need to understand your document. Check to see whether certain key information is missing – for example, a critical series of steps from a set of instructions, an important background that helps beginners understand the main discussion, or definitions of key terms.
  
  
• Omit information your readers do not need. Unnecessary information can also confuse and frustrate readers – after all, it is there, so they feel obligated to read it. For example, you can probably chop theoretical discussion from basic instructions.
  
  
• Change the level of the information you currently have. You may have the right information, but it may be "pitched" at too high or too low a technical level. It may be pitched at the wrong kind of audience – for example, at an expert audience rather than a technician audience. This happens most often when product-design notes are passed off as instructions.
  
  
• Add examples to help readers understand. Examples are one of the most powerful ways to connect with audiences, particularly in instructions. Even in non-instructional text, for example, when you are trying to explain a technical concept, examples are a major help – analogies in particular.
  
  
• Change the level of your examples. You may be using examples, but the technical content or level may not be appropriate for your readers.
  
  
• Change the organization of your information. Sometimes, you can have all the right information but arrange it in the wrong way. For example, there can be too much background information upfront (or too little) such that certain readers get lost. Sometimes, background information needs to be consolidated into the main information – for example, when writing instructions, it is sometimes better to feed in chunks of background at the points where they are immediately needed.
  
  
• Strengthen transitions. It may be difficult for readers, particularly non-specialists, to see the connections between the main sections of your report, between individual paragraphs, and sometimes even between individual sentences. You can make these connections much clearer by adding transition words and by echoing keywords more accurately. Words like "therefore," "for example," and "however" are transition words – they indicate the logic connecting the previous thought to the upcoming thought.
  
  
• Write stronger introductions – both for the whole document and for major sections. People seem to read with more confidence and understanding when they have the "big picture" – a view of what is coming and how it relates to what they have just read. Therefore, make sure you have a strong introduction to the entire document – one that makes clear the topic, purpose, audience, and contents of that document. And for each major section within your document, use mini-introductions that indicate at least the topic of the section and give an overview of the subtopics to be covered in that section.
  
  
• Create topic sentences for paragraphs and paragraph groups. It can help readers immensely by giving them an idea of the topic and purpose of a section (a group of paragraphs) and, in particular, giving them an overview of the subtopics about to be covered.
  
  
• Change sentence style and length. How you write – down at the individual sentence level – can make a big difference too. In instructions, for example, using imperative voice and "you" phrasing is vastly more understandable than the passive voice or third-personal phrasing. Passive, personless writing is harder to read – put people and action in your writing. Similarly, go for active verbs as opposed to verb phrasing. All of this makes your writing more direct and immediate – readers do not have to dig for it. Sentence length matters as well. An average of somewhere between 15 and 25 words per sentence is about right; sentences over 30 words are often mistrusted.
  
  
• Work on sentence clarity and economy. This is closely related to the previous "control" but deserves its own spot. Often, the writing style can be so wordy that it is hard or frustrating to read. When you revise your rough drafts, put them on a diet – go through a draft line by line trying to reduce the overall word, page, or line count by 20 percent. Try it as an experiment and see how you do. You will find a lot of fussy, unnecessary detail and inflated phrasing you can chop out.
  
  
• Use more or different graphics. For non-specialist audiences, you may want to use more graphics – and simpler ones at that. Graphics for specialists are more detailed and more technical.
  
  
• Break text up or consolidate text into meaningful, usable chunks. For non-specialist readers, you may need to have shorter paragraphs.
  
  
• Add cross-references to important information. In technical information, you can help non-specialist readers by pointing them to background sources. If you cannot fully explain a topic on the spot, point to a section or chapter where it is.
  
  
• Use headings and lists. Readers can be intimidated by big, dense paragraphs of writing, uncut by anything other than a blank line now and then. Search your rough drafts for ways to incorporate headings – look for changes in topic or subtopic. Search your writing for listings of things – these can be made into vertical lists. Look for paired listings such as terms and their definitions – these can be made into two-column lists. Of course, be careful not to force this special formatting – do not overdo it.
  
  
• Use special typography, and work with margins, line length, line spacing, type size, and type style. You can do things like making the lines shorter (bringing in the margins), using larger type sizes, and other such tactics. Certain types of styles are believed to be friendlier and more readable than others.

These are the kinds of "controls" that you can use to fine-tune your messages and make them as readily understandable as possible. In contrast, it is the accumulation of lots of problems in these areas – even seemingly trivial ones – that add up to a document being difficult to read and understand.