It’s not enough to know your audience, you have to meet them where there are
Most of us have heard the maxim know your audience. And it is true we make better connections with our audience—be they business stakeholders, a target consumer audience or employees—when we understand who they are. Even if the narrative is the same across audiences, who they are will inform the level of formality, the use of industry buzzwords, the mix of personal opinion versus straight facts and so on.
Less talked about is the concept of meeting your audience members where they are. It’s a subtle but important difference. If their starting point to your narrative is different than yours, it is easy to lose them quickly. To know them means to understand who they are. To meet them where they are is about recognizing there may need to be some education or context-setting before you can even begin your narrative. Are they friendly or hostile? Whether you need them to know, feel or do something, are they already willing or do they need to be convinced?
For example, igniting technology adoption
I worked with a geographically dispersed sales team within a company that lagged behind most large companies in terms of digital savvy. Material was pre-printed and distributed in-session at meetings. Updates to documents were shared via email even though the company had invested in cloud-based technology. It was preferable to fly people to meetings than learn video technology. For the sales team in the field, this created barriers to accessing the latest product material as well as to participating in meetings and training.
Communications and IT had just finished a full-scale upgrade to the team’s cloud-based intranet and content management functionality. The goals included encouraging digital technology adoption, improving information access, and enhancing intra-team connections and culture. News and product updates went live on the home page in real time. Functional teams were given dedicated libraries for content sharing, announcements and chat functionality. Product meetings and training were recorded and shared online for self-paced viewing. The weekly eNewsletter became a news ePostcard, featuring headline links to cloud-based material that could be updated seamlessly without breaking the links. What had once been complicated should have become as easy as the click of a button.
But that’s not what happened. Actually, nothing happened. No one stopped printing material. No one searched the cloud-based libraries to find the latest content or training. Mass emails continued to outpace cloud-based engagement and flights were still preferable to video for meeting attendance. We hadn’t considered that our field-based sales team might not understand the benefits of the new-to-them technology. This meant they were unmotivated to self-explore. We had trained subject matter experts on how to load and feature their content on the new cloud-based drives but we hadn’t educated them on how to respond to requests differently (by sharing links rather than contributing to email overload). We hadn’t met our audience where they were.
It took a multi-pronged campaign to close the gap and inspire the uptake of cloud-based technology. The weekly ePostcard began to feature a technology pro tip each week, including links to self-paced video learnings. Content owners were coached on how to better encourage team members to go online to the intranet and libraries as the first resource for content needs. We gave content owners instructional text to copy/paste into replies in response to push-back that it was easier to send content by email. Open invitation, virtual brown bag lunch sessions were hosted to show people tips and tricks for getting the most out of the new platforms. We worked with sales leaders to schedule Communications and IT into team meetings for personalized instruction aligned to their team’s work. In addition to self-paced training videos, we trained team leads and people managers on virtual meeting technology to create a comfort level with remote meeting participation.
The uptake gained traction, as expected. When lockdown forced businesses into remote work mode in March of 2020, this sales team was operational from day one while the rest of the company struggled to learn new ways of sharing content, working and communicating. We nearly missed it, though, by not taking time to understand where our audience was.
The takeaways
An assumption was made that the introduction of a user-friendly technology to solve a series of stated challenges would naturally inspire engagement and adoption. It’s a rookie change management mistake. We underestimated the team’s ratio of frustration compared to the challenge of learning something new. The sales team was one business line within a larger organization that was also digitally unsophisticated; we had missed an opportunity to instill pride in being early adopters of what would be a company-wide upgrade. We didn’t take the time to position team leaders and people managers as technology champions. In sum, by underestimating our audience’s self-motivation to embrace change—change that would ultimately benefit them in a number of ways—we nearly lost them all together.
This is a very tangible example, which is why I use it. But the principles apply whether you’re changing platforms, dynamics or culture. It’s also an excellent example of internal communications. And the principles apply whether your audience is internal or external.
Do your audience due diligence – As an insider in message development on any topic, it can be easy to forget the level of socialization your received at the beginning of the process. There are templates to help communicators organize audience understanding (both who they are and where they are). You might prefer to map what you know about the audience to their baseline familiarity with the topic. If you have access to the audience, you could even set formal or informal focus groups to gain insights.
Regularly sanity check your messaging for assumptions – Even a project team of seasoned professionals can trip over assumptions. Be your team’s conscious throughout the process.
When you know who your audience is and where they are, take a deep breath and start from the beginning – Start from their beginning, not yours.
