16 Audience Analysis

In order to do an audience analysis, you have to determine your call to action. A call to action refers to what actions you would like your audience to partake in. This can include converting, donating, volunteering, and sponsorships. Once you know what issues you are attempting to solve and what ways people can help, you need to figure out who is the best fit to put these actions to use.

Audience analysis is the process of gathering information about the people in your audience so that you can understand their wants, needs, desires, expectations, beliefs, values, attitudes, and opinions. When you understand your audience, you are better able to cater to their interests and needs.

Why conduct an audience analysis?

Audience analysis is one of the key components of customer discovery. The business model of an NPO will evolve as they explore their customer’s needs. Identifying your initial target market will help you more clearly define the scope of your project and plan for the first several years of operations. Identifying your initial target market will also help you figure out how to allocate your scarce resources even as an NPO that lacks resources, capabilities, and capital.

Audience analysis can be conducted for a low cost as there are a number of different demographic resources available online. There are also a number of market research reports to help entrepreneurs refine segmentation, consumer preferences, as well as compile demographic profiles that can help them discover motivations and buying patterns.

Audience research is undertaken at the initial stages of a communication campaign to understand the intended audience’s needs, knowledge, attitudes, and behaviours, and barriers to a recommended basket of options. At the audience analysis stage, information is also obtained on audience preferences for communication channels and the frequency of usage on these communication channels.

Audience analysis enables the communication planner to determine the types of incentives and barriers that the audience perceive to exist, their most preferred channels or formats, the most credible sources, segment an audience into groups with similar information needs and preferences, select the objectives most appropriate for an audience, select the best media channels to reach an audience, develop concepts or messages to achieve the communications objectives and plan for communication impact assessment.

Diversity is a key dimension of audience membership and audience analysis. While the term “diversity” is often used to refer to racial and ethnic minorities, it is important to realize that audiences can be diverse in a number of different ways. Being mindful of diversity means being respectful of all people and striving to avoid racism, ethnocentrism, sexism, ageism, elitism, and other assumptions.