To build human connections with your audience, you first need to view them as individuals, not labels.
In the fast-paced world of communication, it's easy to get caught up in the latest platform algorithms, media trends, and other strategic distractions. But the truth is, lasting impact comes from understanding a single source of truth: your audience. By truly understanding who you're trying to reach and what they want, need, and expect from you, your message will continue to resonate regardless of the news of the day.
Reach is not enough. To succeed, you need relevance. You need to speak to the voice in your audiences' heads. But first, we need to understand our audience's unique needs, motivation, challenges, and circumstances. And to do this, it doesn't require understanding every single member of your audience, but intimately knowing just one.
The Myth of Mass Audience
Customer, Donor, Partner, and Investor are not audiences, they're outcomes. To truly connect and convert your audience into members of these groups, you must see beyond the labels. Your audience is unique. And while it can be tempting to combine your audience into a single group—broadening their interests, blending their behaviors, and cast an ever-wider net to save yourself the trouble of prioritizing who you’re actually trying to reach, diluting your target will cost you time, money, and effort in the end. Because when you speak to everyone, you connect with no one.
Tip: In addition to increasing engagement rates, focusing your communications on targeting more specific sub-groups has an additional benefit: they will talk to each other. And this is what creates virality. |
Uncovering Human Truths
By targeting smaller circles of people, you can begin to understand them on a more personal level. Put another way, the more focused the dig site, the deeper you can explore. While demographic information can help you target your ads, they will not reveal the person behind the impression.
How would you describe your best friend in a single sentence? Chances are you wouldn’t focus on their age, gender, income, or location. When you know someone well, it doesn’t require a lengthy biography or a bulleted list of traits. You know just what to say. So, how can you truly internalize your audience the way you do with those closest to you?
Rather than listing out adjectives, explore ways to unpack your audience on a more relatable level. For example, instead of describing a donor as "intelligent" or "analytical," you might refer to them as a "data-driven do-gooder who donates to charities the way others invest in stocks." By humanizing your audience, your connection to them will become personal.
Build Empathy Through Story
Truly connecting with your audience demands more than just comprehension; it requires empathy. And one of the best ways build this empathy is by framing their experience as a narrative.
Storytelling is an age-old art form that has proven remarkably effective at conveying information in a memorable way. Humans are not simply “hard-wired to tell stories,” we invented stories. Why do we use them? Because they work.
By transforming your audience's struggle into a hero's journey, akin to the adventures of Indiana Jones or Frodo Baggins, you’ll gain a deeper understanding and appreciation of their deepest aspirations—and the barriers standing in the way. Tools like the StoryBrand Framework provide a structured approach to communicating who your audience is, what they need, and how you can help.
In this framework, your audience is the hero and you are the wise companion—the Obi-Wan Kenobi to their Luke Skywalker—guiding them to success. More than understanding your audience, this approach will help you understand your brand.
Discovering Audience Insights
So, you understand what information you need, now it’s time to discover how to get it. The best way to understand your audience is to simply go to the source: talk to them. And with a few simple, well-structured conversations, you can gain deeper insights than any expensive market analysis could provide. Here are some of the most common methods of gathering audience insights—starting with the most reliable.
Audience Surveys
Surveys offer a broad overview of your audience while allowing you to gain insight into how they think and feel as people. While you might assume email is the preferred communication channel for your audience, a survey can reveal valuable nuances such as the ideal email frequency for different customer segments.
To create an effective survey clearly outline the key information you're looking for. This might include understanding how your audiences spend their money, what platforms they trust for information, or what they think about your brand.
In choosing your survey respondents, make sure that your targets are representative of the average person that you’re attempting to reach. For instance, if you only survey your most satisfied customers, it will not help you reach those that have chosen not to buy from you. By surveying both, it will allow you to compare responses between audiences to understand the barriers to purchasing.
Tip: Start your survey with more general questions (e.g., "what are your priorities for this year") before getting more focused. This will help get survey respondents into the appropriate mindset while also giving you a sense of broader opportunity areas to explore. |
Lastly, remember to keep your survey brief—including no more than 20 questions so that respondents can complete it in around 5 minutes. Explore different formats like multiple choice, sliding scales, or open-ended questions. For instance instead of asking whether they are familiar with your organization (Yes / No), ask how familiar they are (Not Familiar / Somewhat Familiar / Fairly Familiar / Very Familiar).
When surveying your audience, timing is everything. By surveying customers shortly after they purchase, it will give you an ongoing sense of how much new customers appreciate your products month to month.
Audience Interviews
While surveys allow you to explore a broader area, audience interviews allow you to examine deeper depths. If you plan to couple a survey with interviews, consider how you can divide or balance questions across both types of research to ensure that they are complementary. For instance, if you discovered that three-fourths of survey respondents considered your brand to be “Innovative,” use a portion of your audience interviews to understand why.
Similar to your survey, begin with more general questions before getting more specific. However, feel free to go where the conversation takes you.
Tip: Go where the conversation takes you. Interviews give you the flexibility to pursue different topics that you might not have planned on discussing. These tangents can lead to valuable discoveries that may change the way you think about your audience. |
Be an active listener. Encourage open dialogue and avoid interrupting. The goal of these conversations is to understand your audience's perceptions—not to convince them of yours. So, listen more than you talk. If you get defensive, they will simply keep their feelings to themselves.
Market Intelligence
If you’re unable to create your own, firsthand research (i.e., primary research), there are still mountains of existing, third-party research (i.e., secondary research) that you can use. Audience intelligence platforms like YouGov, USAFacts, or Global Web Index offer a robust source of free insights.
Audience insights range from what people enjoy doing to what products they buy to how they feel about the world. While these can help give you a well-rounded understanding of broader audiences, they may be less helpful with more niche audiences like CTOs at mid-sized community banks.
Beyond dedicated research platforms, there is also a wealth of insights published by marketing and communications agencies, news organizations, or even your competitors which can give you a deeper understanding of the latest audience trends. However, keep in mind, that this type of research can sometimes be biased or self-serving. So, if you see a global sustainability report published by a major oil company, consider the source.
Media + Social Conversation
Lastly, consider the latest media coverage and social conversation which can offer a broad indication of audiences care about. Don’t simply search Google, limit your search to specific outlets that are most relevant to your audience, whether it’s mainstream, business, technology, or other areas. What outlets is your audience reading today?
When exploring social media conversation, keep in mind that social conversation is not always reflective of your audience's perception. What some people say online is not the same as what all people believe. These mediums are governed by algorithms and the online community encompasses plenty of people that are not part of your target audience, so just because something is “trending,” that does not mean it’s appropriate for your audience.
Engage Humans, Not Labels.
In an era dominated by algorithms and data, it's easy to forget the fundamental truth: people are at the heart of every successful campaign. Remember, your audience is not a faceless mass; they are individuals with unique experiences, aspirations, and challenges. By understanding their world on a personal level, you'll be better equipped to create messages that resonate, inspire, and convert.
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