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Three levels of audience analysis: looking for insights

Influencing behavior is the real goal of any communication in business. In order to push the audience in the right direction - to sell, to prove, to convince - you need to understand who these people are, where they are now, and what steps separate them from the right decision.

For many years I have been preparing speakers for TED, scientists for defenses, start-ups for pitches, tops for conflict negotiations. In each of these cases, speech has a fundamental task. In this article I will tell you how deep audience analysis helps to solve these problems .

Actor analysis


People do not listen to you to become more informed - they want to solve their problems. The investor wants to understand whether the contribution will be safe and profitable. Therefore, in the pitch, you show the competencies of the team, market capacity, development profitability. The audience of the SMM-conference is waiting for competitive solutions. Therefore, you are telling a powerful Tik-Tok promotion case. An HR interview is trying to figure out if you are eligible for a job. Tell him or her about the cool results in a similar position - profit. The investor, conference audience and HR in these examples are actors.
An actor is an actor; individual, social group, organization, institution, community of people committing actions directed at others.
The purpose of your speech at the interview, conference, pitch is to prove to the actor that he has every reason to act the way you need.

All the actors in your audience can be divided into 3 categories:

decision - maker - the decision maker . These people have the ability and resources to do what you need. For example, a department head might hire you. He needs to know that you are competent. Remember: we need to influence the decision maker.

Agents of influence- people influencing the decision of the decision maker. For example, when selecting candidates, HR often becomes the agent of influence. At the first interview, the recruiter filters those who are just past. He cannot make a key decision, but can critically prevent him. Then HR passes the summary of the meeting to the next level. Remember: decision makers will always listen to agents of influence.

Exposure agent- this is the one who will receive the maximum benefit or damage from the decision. The company is not looking for a new employee so that he likes HR and obeys the manager, but so that he, for example, quickly encodes the application engine. This will speed up product development, help the company close the contract on time and bring a lot of money. The main agent of influence in this case is the owner of the business. Will the salary of the new developer in the project pay off, will it help my department to close the contract faster and bring profit to the oouner? This is what the manager thinks about before accepting a newbie. Remember: the decision maker listens to the agents of influence and makes a decision based on how it affects the agent of influence.

And here is another example: on your instagram you prove the need to introduce strict sanitary standards for quarantine. Your audience may include influence agents (media and bloggers) and influence agents (ordinary people). The decision-maker in this example is the state, because only it can introduce sanitary standards. But it makes no sense to expect that the legislature will make a fundamental decision based on your story. But if the media (influence agents) scam you and consider it their goal to convince the government to take measures, this will help you. If at the same time the society (agent of influence) will translate this goal as absolutely necessary for its own good, the state (DM) will have to focus on this when making a decision. Well, or at least you will create a community of like-minded people around your idea.

Motivation criteria


To understand what communication with different actors in your audience will be based on, you need to analyze each group according to motivation criteria. Here they are:

  • Interests and desires
  • Goals - what needs to be achieved in order to satisfy interests and desires.
  • Tasks - what needs to be done to achieve the goal.
  • Opportunities are source resources that will determine the ability to complete tasks.

In the interview example, you communicate with each type of actor separately - they have different tasks, different opportunities and competencies. This is important for finding key messages , I will return to them in the next article.

What about quarantine? In this topic, a citizen receives damage or benefits - he is an agent of influence.

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The problems of one group of actors often arise due to a clash of interests with other groups. For example, you are on the stage of an HR conference. Make a presentation of your hr-tech product - a bot for recruiting automation. In general, it is clear that the bot is cool, but it seems to be so normal. How to convince the audience to try your product?

Imagine that recruiters want to quickly bring many candidates to the company, because they have such a KPI. Whether these candidates will close real gaps in team competencies is the concern of the department head. Business suffers because the selection is not accurate enough, and HR cannot spend time on accurate selection - quantitative KPIs will be low. Tell these people how to solve their problems using your bot.

With a good analysis of the actors and their problems, conflict resolution will be obvious. They will help you find the exact arguments. I will explain more about argumentation and persuasion in the following articles. First, we finish the analysis of the audience and understand what goal we can set for a specific meeting, presentation or speech.

Attitude / Awareness Matrix


Put your audience at the intersection of two variables: attitude to your main idea and awareness about it. For example, recruiters have already seen a thousand of these bots and believe that they are all expensive crutches. Or, for example, business owners only heard remotely about hr-tech, but lose so much money due to staff turnover that they are ready to try a progressive solution.



The important thing is that in one act of communication - in one speech, one meeting, one letter - it is impossible to change the position of your audience in the matrix by more than one cell in any direction. If, for the necessary action to be taken, the actor must know the subject of your speech perfectly and treat it well, but now he hasn’t read it, but condemns it, then at the end of the performance you will not be drowned in flowers. Of course, you need to start anyway.Just to achieve your goal you will have to build a multi-path - a communication strategy.

We have adapted the cheat sheet on the “attitude-awareness” matrix for smartphones with an example of a communication strategy - you can download it here. In the next text, we’ll analyze another framework - the matrix of key messages. The ISS will help to understand what components the speech will consist of, what specific topics need to be highlighted at the meeting, what answers should be prepared for negotiations.

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