Audience Analysis and Its Types l Analyze your Audience This Way At Any Event

We’re about to give a speech or presentation we might be thinking a lot about things like a body language or tonality content of our speech but one thing that i’ve been guilty of forgetting and i’ve seen a lot of people not pay attention to is actually understanding who the audience really is and the same speech delivered to two different audiences can have vastly vastly different results so that’s what we’re going to talk about here today what are the important things that we need to know about our audience even before we start to craft our speech and how do we really go about getting to know that information hey my name is and I’m the founder of frantically speaking and i love learning about effective communications.

And sharing those learnings with you so that you can level up your communication scheme as well we’re going to break this down into two parts we’re going to start by talking about what are the important things we need to know about the audience and secondly how to go about getting that information so starting with what we need to know there are four things over here first we’re going to start off with the basics these are things that we definitely should know about the people we are about to speak to this includes things like the size of the audience the average age the gender the occupation um these are basic things that if we don’t know or if we are wrong the entire speech can be completely differently for example if the audience is going to be of a smaller size the level of interactive elements that you can add here can be so much more intimate as opposed to something with the larger audience where it has to be a lot more structured and a lot more formal maybe um if the audience is skewed towards a particular age or gender we need to have our content catering towards them if you have an audience which has both the age groups within one particular crowd itself the content needs to be wide enough to be to be inclusive enough to have both the age groups understand what you’re trying to say.

So the type of pop culture references you might be using the type of slides you might be showing the type of language you use it all comes down to what the audience gets or you resonate with and if you have like a very diverse audience in front of you it’s kind of it can be kind of tricky to include all the elements that can appeal to both these different age groups so knowing this information will give you the direction you need to take to craft the basic content and tonality of your speech the next thing you take into account and which is the most important thing is the context what i mean by this that is your speech the place of speaking in is it corporate setting it’s a formal setting this is the wedding toast this is an informal party is it the toastmasters speeches of the contest conference what is the context that you’re speaking and what type of tone do you need to address this particular audience with so light went off and understanding this will this is the kind of cracks that we need to know to um to craft our tonality around and materiality i don’t mean a voice modulation but the overall tone of our speech because i i’ve done this once where in i had to speak at a very formal corporate event and i was just using very humorous language very informal uh words and there it just did not wipe the audience the entire setting was very formal.

And poised and i was just coming around goofing about on stage which did not go well with the crowd and on the other hand when i was in college i was a lot more formal i was a lot more tight on stage whereas a humorous tonality or an entertaining personality would have just been so much better which uh it would have just resonated so much better with a younger crowd like a college crowd so understanding the context of your audience the setting of where you’re really speaking at is very very important to understand the entire tone of your speech one more thing to keep into account here is that while understanding context we need to know whether the people you’re addressing are they there voluntarily or i think it’s required to be there if they’re there voluntarily you won’t have to battle already they’re most likely already interested in what you have to say they’re interested in you as a speaker and the thing that you’re about to speak about but if they are required to sit there then they probably already dislike you even before you get on stage right out of college i was doing a small sales gig and i had to address college students and um the teacher would kind of make them wait back right before they break.

And allow give give me a few minutes to speak to them and of course they did not want to sit there they wanted to they would rather go for their break than really talk to some sales guy pitch some kind of product or service to them so knowing that information that they were dead they were kind of forced to sit there uh it helped me grasp the context of my speech to at least get some of their attention or some of their empathy to listen to me so i would start the speech uh so i’ll start my pitch by saying that hey guys i know that they’re kind of forced to sit here and rather be in your break from the center hear me talk but if you just give me a few minutes of your time i’m sure i can add some value to you and this would win over at least a few of them or at least it would make them slightly more patient to sit and talk to sit and hear me talk for a few minutes so understanding context prime importance the next thing that we want to know is the knowledge of the audience whatever subject you’re speaking on is the audience fairly new to that or do they have a fair amount of understanding of whatever your subject is if they’re fairly new to it you your content needs to be a lot more broader um you have to cover a lot of foundational elements.

Your tone is to be a lot friendlier and encouraging uh whereas if they are a lot more advanced in terms of knowledge uh you can use a lot more jargon you can be a lot more technical you can be slightly harsher with the audience by expecting them to know certain things and the level that you’re interacting with them on the type of questions you’re asking them uh your entire content and delivery can be a lot faster and a lot heavier in terms of the information you’re providing so understanding knowledge will just help you get the sense of how to craft a speech in terms of keeping it more advanced or keeping it more fundamental and therefore the last thing that we need to know about the audience is their mood now i’m just i’ve ignored this so many times and it’s just never worked out well even if we know our speech even if our material is top notch and even if the audience wants to listen to you and wants to be there for your speech if your speech is after a lunch break or if you’re the last speaker in a four hour event the audience obviously just doesn’t have the capacity to listen to you or to learn more um by that time they probably just want to go home so to know uh so understanding this mood is very important to know when you are going to be speaking to the audience.

At what time of day what number of speaker you are how into the event the audience will be when you are supposed to go on the stage is extremely important because if you are supposed to go on stage at the time when you know the audience is not very primed is not very enthusiastic try and cut your speech a little shorter even though you allotted maybe 20 minutes or one hour to speak having fewer points to talk about or concise in your material try to make it slightly more fun and interactive will even if you’re not probably fully prepared for that or didn’t account for it before adding those elements in cutting something short will just help in that situation because the audience is just not going to be able to absorb that much information at that moment so understand the mood of your audience very important you might have to make some last minute changes if you are if you don’t know this already uh if you don’t know when you’re going to be really talking to them so try and get that information early on so if you so if they are going to be at a stage where you’re not going to be able to pay that much attention you know how much material to cut down what type of things to add in your speech to take out.

And whatnot okay so those are the four things that we need to know about our audience now let’s talk about four things that we can do to really get this information the first go-to thing that i always try is to contact the host of the venue or whoever or the person who invited me for the speech presentation pitch or whatever it might be um they usually have they might be the coordinators of the uh particular event and they uh probably would be having a good understanding of at least the basics of the audience so things like the age size occupation level of knowledge and experience this type of information is probably fairly easy to get from the person who’s hosting who’s the host of the venue or the person inviting you for that particular event one thing to add over here is that if you do have access to this person and if they allow you to access the database of the audience so the email ids or phone numbers you can even send out a small survey to the audience or to understand a few nuances that you might need to know before you actually craft your speech if they’re unwilling to give you the data you can request them to pass on the survey to the people.

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Who already present for the event um but this is kind of like a 50-50 thing it really depends on the relationship with the host it depends on how willing they are to really do this for you because it will require a little bit of extra effort on their part so if that is a possibility and if you do need that extra information then a survey is something that you can try as well another important thing to ask the host is to know that especially if you’re giving a speech in a different country or a locality that you’re not familiar with is to understand are there any biases that the audience hold are there any beliefs or anything that you should probably stay away from talking about uh when you’re addressing that audience that you should be aware about knowing this is very important especially if you’re not aware of the culture that you’re the of the culture of the audience whom you’re going to be addressing because certain things might be offensive consider the sense of some places while they might be colloquial or normal language to you so knowing those things would be very important especially if you’re completely unfamiliar.

With that place’s culture the host is not accessible to you another way to get some information about the audience is to use LinkedIn this LinkedIn has come to my aid a lot especially for pitch presentations when i have to be pitching to a bird room of about 10 to 15 people um to to to go to people’s LinkedIn profiles and understand what their experience and job history is it helps me know what type of things do i need to include in my presentation do i need to make it a lot more foundational other people fairly experienced enough that i can just jump straight to the point is that a mix of both crowds what’s the medium age group these things will help me kind of just craft my presentation will be better if you’re speaking to a very large crowd LinkedIn might not be the best option although you can try and identify some key people within the audience and at least get their background information so you have somewhat of an understanding of who you’re speaking to if the internet isn’t cutting it for you or the venue host is not available the best thing to do is to arrive early and greet the audience.

That’s attending that particular event now this might be a little last minute thing to do but it will at least help us give some understanding about things like what their education what their educational background is uh what that what the average occupation is age group and gender and things along those lines but this time you probably already have a fair understanding of the context you’re in and what time of the day you’re going to be delivering your speech so that you can predict the mood of the audience so that information is already there this is mainly done to get those slightly more basic things in place so that if you think that they’re not really if there are some aspects of recipes that are not related to this audience and if none of these things work for whatever reason there’s a technique that you can use which i learnt in toastmasters but I’ve also seen one of my favorite people use it uh his name is Gary Vayner Chuk and I’m sure you’ve heard of him as well and he uses this technique called the call and response early on in his career when he would go around speaking at events he would ask the audience at the very beginning how many of them have never heard.

Of him and almost more than i think 50 of the audience would raise their hands and this would give him an understanding of how much context he needs to set about itself before diving into the actual informational points that the audience was actually there for so if more than 50 of the people don’t didn’t know about it he would start by talking about his backstory who he is why is he an authority in the space and why people should listen to him so having this call and response technique is slightly advanced and you might be required to make a few tweaks in your speech or presentation as you go along on the spot as well depending on what the audience’s audience is responding with but if you really have no understanding of certain things you need to know then this is the last resort that you can use as well and that’s about it four things that we need to know about our audience and four ways to try and get to know those things if you have any more questions with regard to things like public speaking communications or anything along those lines we have an entire website with a bunch of resources and in-depth articles dedicated just for that so go check out franticallyspeaking.com

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