Know Your Audience, It Might Be Time To Adjust Your Focus



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Who is your audience?

Presentation is made to be presented in front of the audience. A specific audience. Every presentation has its own specific and different audience. You need to deal with them differently.

Understanding your audience—people who will come to attend and listen to you—will help you to understand how they process the information and what they want to hear from a presentation.

This is very important, not only in constructing the content, but also in making adjustments to the entire design of the presentation, to help you influencing the audience effectively.

If we look at the three interrelated components in a presentation, one of the most important key in a presentation is the audience. You are there to give a presentation and create a communication process for them.

Recognizing Your Audience is Very Important

Understanding your audience is a key to create and deliver a great presentation. You cannot offer something interesting to your audience unless you know who they are. You have to know what they need and want from your presentation.

Its hard to expect an effective communication process if you don’t know their point of view when they are listening to you.

As presenter, you will find it difficult to relate yourself with them. Your audience will also have difficulties to understand you.

Know Your Audience It Might Be Time To Adjust Your Focus Without

It can create a situation that will leads to frustration: You are frustrated because you can not make them understand, and they are frustrated because it is difficult to understand you.

You will not encounter this situation if you know your audience well. Your job will be much easier, because you know exactly what they want. You can choose which information should get across and which one is not necessary. Convincing the audience will becomes much easier too, because you understand what factors that influences them to take action.

Recognizing the audience is not just knowing that they are your boss, co-workers, students, or a group of society. Knowing the audience includes knowing their name, their position in the organization, what decision they make, and what they need from your presentation. And, more importantly, why they come to your presentation.

Recognize your audience. This is what distinguishes a great presenter from an ordinary one.

The first thing a great presenter will do is identifying their audience. Then use these valuable information to design a relevant and effective presentation.

Ordinary presenters, that often deliver a monotonous and ineffective presentation feel that it is not important to find out in detail who their audience is. They simply give the same presentation to different audiences.

Every communication is unique. And presentation is a communication. Your audience and the situation surrounding the communication process will influence it’s effectiveness.

Who is the Audience of your presentation?

Before starting to prepare a presentation, find out who will present in your presentation. More information you have will help your readiness to act in a presentation.

In The Art of War, Sun Tzu said, “He who knows his enemy and himself well will not be defeated in a hundred battles. He who knows himself but not his enemy, will have an even chance of victory. He who does not know himself and his enemy, is bound to suffer defeat in all battles.”

In short, Sun Tzu said: “A person who recognize himself, recognize his opponent and recognize the battlefield, will win in every battle.”

A presentation is a battlefield of communications. You want the audience to accept and understand your message as good as possible.

That’s why you have to recognize your strength as a presenter, recognize your opponent (audience and what they expect), and recognize the battlefield (media communication, situation surrounding the presentation, and the specific approach that you may need). With all of this you are ready to win every presentation.

What You Need To Know From the Audience?

We have summarized here several things you need to know about your audience:

  • Who will present to your presentation?
  • What is their position in the organization?
  • What is their educational background, or their job?
  • What is their level of knowledge about the topic you will deliver?
  • What is their learning style?
  • What they like to hear and what they don’t?
  • What is their purpose in listening to your presentation?
  • Why they need to listen to you?

Now, you know why understanding the audience is so crucial in a presentation.

Don’t forget that the first thing you have to do every time you prepare a presentation is recognizing your audience. It will help you a lot in creating content and designing the most appropriate communication for them.


Key audience analysis factors

Audience expectations

Different audiences can have completely different expectations about the topics and speaker. Ignoring these differences can have a negative effect on your speech. Imagine that you’re asked to speak at the memorial service for a close friend. The audience will expect your speech to praise the life of the deceased. If you start talking about the flaws of the person, the audience is likely to react badly to it.

Knowledge of topic

You need to find out how much your audience already knows about your topic as an audiences knowledge can vary widely. Two ways to achieve this could be:

  • Research who else is speaking at the event and the topics they are presenting (if it’s been made public)
  • Gauge the type of people who will attend using the event website or social media profiles

Never overestimate the audience’s knowledge of a topic. If you start speaking about complex algorithms for robotics, but the listeners are not familiar with basic genetics, they’ll quickly lose interest and find something to distract themselves with.

On the other hand, drastically underestimating the audience’s knowledge may result in a speech that sounds condescending.

Setting

Presentation setting, such as what time you are presenting and style of the conference room, will influence audience’s ability and desire to listen.

Finding out ahead of time the different environment and situational factors. This will give you plenty of time to prepare for an audience of 1000 when you were expecting 50. You want to understand whether there will be a stage, where your slides will be shown, what technology is available to you, who is presenting before you and other factors.

Take into account the way that the setting will affect audience attention and participation. If you’re scheduled to speak at the end of the day, you’ll have to make the speech more entertaining and appear more enthusiasm to keep their attention.

Read more about how to speak to an unruly crowd if you're stuck with an end of day presentation slot.

Audience size

Your speech will change depending on the size of the audience. In general, the larger the audience the more formal the presentation should be. Using everyday language when speaking to a group of 5 people is often appropriate. However, you’ll need a well throughout structure and literary techniques when talking to 500 people. Large audiences often require that you use a microphone and speak from an elevated platform.

Attitude toward topic

Being able to understand the audiences attitudes about a topic will help you connect with them. Imagine you’re trying to convince people at a town hall to build a new college. You’ll be inclined to spend the majority of the speech giving reasons why a college would benefit the town.

If you find that the major worry was how much this would cost students, you can talk more about funding available to the students. The persuasive power of the speech is therefore directed at the most important obstacle to the building the college.

Demographics

Know Your Audience, It Might Be Time To Adjust Your Focus

The demographic factors of an audience include:

  • Age
  • Gender
  • Religion
  • Ethnic background
  • Class
  • Job or Career
  • Education

These categories often underpin the individuals experiences and beliefs, so you should tailor your speech accordingly. Presenting at a conference in London will be a very different experience to presenting in Shanghai. The structure of your speech and words you use will probably be very different.

Using demographic factors to guide speech-making does not mean changing the goal of the speech for every different audience; rather, consider what pieces of information will be most important for members of different demographic groups.

Voluntariness

Audiences are either hostile, critical, uninformed or sympathetic. Knowing the difference will assist in establishing the content of your speech. It’s very hard to generate and maintain interest with a hostile audience. You’ll definitely want to know if you’re up against this so you can plan ahead for it.

Egocentrism

Most audience members are interested in things that directly affect them or their company. An effective speaker must be able to show their audience why the topic they are speaking on should be important to them.

Know Your Audience It Might Be Time To Adjust Your Focus As A


Read more about audience analysis.