Your Two Audiences

Whether you are speaking from the stage, writing a post, recording a video, or presenting a webinar, you are addressing two audiences. In today’s piece, we will look at who these two audiences are and how the make-up of these two audiences must influence your presentation.

The two-audience model is one I developed over several years and started teaching over the past few years. This concept started as I was coaching our TEDxRuakura speakers for our event. It is most important for a speaker in a live environment where the audience is expected to sit through this speaker to get to the next one.

As such, throughout this discussion, I will focus on the relevance of a speaking engagement and leave it to you to apply it to other communication situations.

Your Target Audience

The speaker's target audience is the first audience and the one that most people focus on. If you have a business offering goods and services, your ideal client avatar is probably your target audience. If you are speaking for social justice or some sort of cause, your target audience might be people who can facilitate change.

You need to be keenly aware of who your target audience is (and isn’t). You should know where they are now in their thoughts and beliefs and where you want to take them with your talk or your subsequent interactions.

This is all part of the “Clarity” foundation of the Pitching Pyramid. I can never overstress the importance of planning your strategy long before you create a talk or accept a speaking opportunity.

Because of your strategy and this particular speaking opportunity, you will want to move your target audience from one state to another. It may be for them to identify themselves and connect with you, it may be to make a purchase, or it may be to get them into a funnel for a major commitment.

The Other Audience

So you have your target audience, but what about everyone sitting in front of you who doesn’t fit that description? I used to refer to them as your Non-Target Audience, but as I have better understood the opportunity they represent, I now refer to them as your Viral Audience.

Most coaches, salespeople and speakers will advise you to focus on your target audience and maybe throw a few comments in for everyone else. This isn’t terrible advice for someone starting out, but if your mission is important enough, this is a wasted opportunity.

Many speaking opportunities will have more Viral than Target Audience members. The experts mentioned before might advise you not to bother with this opportunity, and if you have more business than you can handle, I would agree. But if this is not the case, then your strategy should have a talk you can give that raises interest and identifies new prospects.

The Make-up of Your Audience

Before we get deeper into this, we need to clarify your audience's different make-up and how that impacts your talk. Note that this is dealt with in the second level of the Pitching Pyramid: “Understand your Audience”.

You can think of every speaking opportunity as being on a spectrum with an all-Target Audience at one end and an all-Viral Audience at the other, with a varied mix between. (see diagram).

Those with more of your target audience I refer to as an industry audience, and those with less of your target audience I refer to as a general audience.

This is best explained with an example.

Let’s say your target audience is women over 40 interested in fitness through Yoga. If you were to speak at a TEDx event, your audience makeup would be to the right of the chart. A few people may be interested in your topic, but the vast majority have little interest and no knowledge.

Whereas if you were speaking at a Mature Women’s Health event, you would be to the left of the chart.

And if you spoke at a Yoga event, you may be towards the middle of the chart as 50% may be men or women below your target age.

Each event will require a slightly different talk to match the audience’s make-up. The main thrust of the talk to your target audience will remain the same, but the choice of words and the simplification of your topic will change.

At the Yoga event, you can comfortably use some jargon - specific Yoga names and references - with the confidence that most of those present will know what you are talking about. But at the TEDx event, you must be careful to explain any such names or references you use, as most of the audience will not know them.

This was our biggest challenge with TEDx Speakers who are used to talking at a high level to people in their industry. We had to coach them to simplify things for the intelligent layperson so that it was still engaging, intriguing and compelling. We knew our audience well, and we coached our speakers to meet the needs of our audience.

Why is this important

If you have ever been in an audience and the speaker is talking over your head, you will have looked around the audience to see if you are the only person having trouble keeping up with what is being spoken.

Everyone else in that situation is doing the same thing. If many people are looking around, you feel like you are not alone and now have permission to fidget, pull out your phone to plan your calendar or check social media. But if everyone else is in rapt attention, you are less likely to do these things and more likely to try to keep up.

Even if you are engaged with the speaker, the collective response of the audience is a powerful force. If the majority of the audience is disengaged, fidgety and whispering, this will negatively impact your experience of the talk.

Also, from a strategy perspective, many times, you will want to take up both industry and general audience opportunities. The goal in industry audiences may be around creating customers and converting prospects. In contrast, the goal in general audiences is to identify new prospects and raise your profile and the possibilities of your services to new audiences.

The Viral Audience Opportunity

In coaching business people and professional speakers, I realised there is a huge opportunity in addressing the Viral Audience in addition to your Target Audience. Going back to our example, if you are talking to a TEDx audience and your target audience is Women over 40 interested in fitness through yoga, then the chances are high that most of the people in that room know someone who fits your target audience.

The first thing to do is to make it clear who you can help and how you can help them. Really speak to your target market. The young man in the audience knows he is not your target audience, but you want to empower him to refer his mother, who is your target market, to you.

This is the reason I teach people to have multiple calls to action (CTA). A specific action for your Target Audience and a specific action for your Viral Audience. The Viral Audience CTA may be simply to share a link to a lead magnet (maybe a recording of the presentation you have just given) with someone they care about whom you can help.

As with any call to action, the simpler it is for them to take action, the more likely it will happen.

By adding this Viral Audience call to action, you have significantly increased the reach of your presentation.

BUT! - This only works if you have enough engagement built into your talk for the Viral Audience.

You need to capture their interest and imagination enough so they almost feel they wish they were a woman over 40 so they could take advantage of your offer!

Conclusion

There is a lot to this Two-Audience model. I hope I have done it justice here and opened your mind to another dimension of your communication with groups.

There is some relevance to any one-to-many communication. The major difference is that asynchronous content - written, video, or audio - often results in the non-target audience simply switching it off and going on to other things. However, if you approach them that way, they are still a Viral Audience. They still have the opportunity to connect you to your Target Audience if you structure your communication the right way.

In 2024, I am considering doing some small weekend workshops on Clarity - Strategic & Tactical Objectives and Understanding Your Audience - Matching your talk to different audience make-ups. Nothing is planned yet, but please comment here or message me if you want to be informed.

Snippets is a section where I take some interesting text I have come across in the previous week and comment on it.

This week, I came across a couple of things that made me stop and think.

The first is a business truism:

If the rate of change outside your business is faster than the rate of change inside your business, then you are soon going to be out of business.

You can look at the topics you speak about as a microcosm of this. If what you are talking bout hasn’t taken into account many of the changes happening in the world right now, then you may not be getting the speaking or audience engagement you are used to.

Related to this, I heard about an interaction with Jeff Bezos, who was being interviewed. The interviewer asked what he thought would change over the coming few years. Supposedly, Bezos paused and then admitted that he gave little thought to what would change in the future. When pressed on why, he explained that he preferred to focus on what wouldn’t change.

He knows that what wouldn’t change is that customers would want the lowest cost, the biggest choice and the fastest delivery. Those things would never change, and so Amazon focuses on these things. The point is that a dependable business should be based on the unchangeable, not the changeable.

Given what is changing with the world and the relevance of what you talk about, it is important to identify and highlight things that will remain the same and why giving them the focus they deserve is important.

Unpacking Wisdom is a weekly section where I dive into a famous (or not so famous) quote and explore how this can apply to the Compelling Communicator.

If you have read my previous issues, you know I love to throw the odd random quote in amongst the deep and meaningful ones. But this doesn’t mean there isn’t a real lesson to be derived from an otherwise innocuous or humorous quote. Let me know if this one makes you think!

I often see speakers who take the stage and proceed with almost a lecture which is rooted deeply in their view of the world, with no awareness that other views of the world exist. We can all succumb to this trap but must remain vigilant to avoid it.

By assuming that everyone shares our worldview or map of reality, we risk alienating a portion of our audience.

Earlier this year, I did some work with the Chiefs, the super rugby team. I was working with professional athletes who are steeped in their particular sport and their competition. They have to be. In order to be competitive, they need to eat, breathe and sleep rugby.

It would be easy for some of these players to take the stage and assume that rugby is as important to the audience as it is for them. Obviously, this is not usually the case. If it is a general audience, they may have little insight into what it takes to be a serious athlete, let alone the specific demands of a rugby season.

The answer is not to pretend you are something you are not but to simply acknowledge that there are different perspectives.

If one of these players took to the stage and said: “Rugby may be of interest to some of you, a passion for others, and annoyance to (hopefully), very few of you. But to me, it is my life. And that leads to some interesting experiences…” then they will grab the attention of even those that dislike the game because they have been acknowledged.

So, take a moment to think of areas where you automatically ascribe your rationale or goals to everyone else. How can you acknowledge other ideas so you can bring them on the journey with you?

Wisdom from Homer Simpson - Who would’ve thunk it! ;-)

What I am up to this week…

Professionally:

I had a presentation on speaking for Authors this weekend. This week I have some Instructional Design work, and I am creating a limited series podcast on cyber security.

Recreationally:

I haven’t had time to relax, despite the long weekend. -Unless learning about and playing with OBS counts as recreation!

What I am reading:

I have started reading Guide on the Side: Winning with Courses in the Age of AI by Danny Iny. I have found it very interesting so far, and it sparked some of today’s snippets. I will, no doubt, share more that is relevant as I go through it.

What I am watching:

After watching 14 feature films in a row at the 24th annual 24-hour film festival last weekend, I am giving the screen a bit of a rest…