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A business seldom has just a single audience group to communicate with. Tailoring the amount and type of information to each audience group, based on the level of knowledge that they already have about your field and your business, can maximise your communications effectiveness,

Consider:

Answering these questions will you determine the amount of facts to present, how to structure the communications, and determine the ratio of marketing/emotive language to facts.

Expert or prosumer with deep knowledge

The experts and specialists in your field, and the prosumers (professional consumers) know a lot of technical details and your field and your products and services.

They think critically about their specialisation, and want to quickly get to the meat of the information. This group is the least likely to be swayed by marketing language and tactics.

For this audience group, you may want to:

Typical business communications for this group:

Smart, critical thinker with good general knowledge

These are generally adaptable people who have a good combination of critical thinking skills, intuition from life experience, and a range of general knowledge. They are sensitive to marketing spin, misinformation and scams.

Some of your prosumers will fall into this group. There is an opportunity here for your business to help educate these budding prosumers and convince them of the merits of your product or service.

For this audience group, you may want to:

Typical business communications for this group:

Rote-learner loaded with facts

Some people know a lot of rote-learnt, factual detail about your field. But they may not have as much actual functional understanding as the two groups above.

They may have a fairly rigid, rules-based approach to your communications. They are more susceptible to believing, without too much questioning, what you tell them; especially if your organisation is regarded as one of the sources of expert knowledge.

A large proportion of consumers in the general public will fall within this group.

For this audience group, you may want to:

Typical business communications for this group:

Newbie open to learning

The people in this group don’t know what they don’t know. It can be initially challenging to communicate to this group because they are not seeking out to connect with you in the first place.

You can however, try to attract their attention. This is a great opportunity to educate and empower these potential new customers to make more informed decisions; to start building a trust in your business.

For this audience group, you may want to:

Typical business communications for this group:

The wilfully ignorant

This audience group has already formed rigid and inflexible opinions of your field or your business. It will be just about impossible to convince this group of anything contrary to their beliefs, regardless of actual facts.

You may still have to communicate with such a group. A petrochemical company will still at times need to communicate with an environmental group. An oncology clinic may need to reach out to homeopaths.

About the only productive approach is to focus on the emotional side over any marketing messages or technical details.

For this audience group, you may want to:

Typical business communications for this group:

Your intention matters

The intentions behind your communications matter because they colour the feel and tone. Marketing language, appealing to emotions and other such techniques are not inherently unethical of course. It is how you use them.

Conventional marketing and PR is somewhat tainted by the bad apples who misrepresent, manipulate and spin communications; such as the people who write non-apologies. Audiences are increasingly wary of such deception, and will view organisations that do so with cynicism and distrust.

If you intend to do the right thing by your audience, this will show through in your actions. Inauthenticity is likely to turn your audience off regardless of how well crafted your message is.

Image: Diverse audience via Shutterstock.