How to Perform Audience Analysis

What is Audience Analysis?

Audience analysis is the process of understanding your audience and their needs so that you can create content that meets those needs.

The issue is important for writers because it helps them to understand who they’re writing for, what they want to achieve, and how they can best reach their target audience.

Audience, a.k.a. “end users”, is a very important factor when you’re writing a technical document. For a document to be effective, it has to be appropriate for its intended audience. That’s one fundamental truth you have to keep in mind when creating your guides and manuals.

The Difficulty of Determining the Audience

However, as a technical writer producing document since 1998, I have to tell you that determining your audience is not always easy. And there is research that supports that statement.

David L. Carson of the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (who passed away in 2003) for example said a technical writer usually performs his or her job with little or no knowledge about the audience. Tech writers usually write with a fictitious and imagined “general audience” in mind. I agree with Carson totally since my day-to-day experience supports that assertion.

And what does it mean to “determine” who the audience is?

One way to approach this question is to look at the DEMOGRAPHICAL, EDUCATIONAL and SOCIAL/CULTURAL PROFILE of the audience like

• The age group of the audience
• The gender profile of the audience (if relevant at all)
• Ethnic, national or racial profile (if relevant at all)
• General educational level of the audience
• The background the audience has in the topic
• The interest and motivation of the audience

Let’s explain with an example why some of these factors might be important when writing a technical document.

Age and Education

If your audience consists of senior citizens, they may not know what a “server” is or what a “terabyte” represents. You may have to take your time explaining such technical terms. But for a younger college-age audience there may not be a need to do that. Actually, if you do that there is a chance that you may alienate your young and educated audience.

A special case: if your audience is a group of retirees who worked as senior engineers for IBM and CISCO, again there would be no need to explain a “server” and a “terabyte.”  You’d again be alienating your audience if you attempt to do so.

Gender Issue in Audience Analysis

If your audience consists 90% of females, and you are writing a manual that explains how the human digestive system works, you probably should not mention “chewing smokeless tobacco” as an example of anything. Why? Because an overwhelming majority of tobacco chewers in the United States are white males. Thus a female audience may not relate easily to an activity that they have no experience with.

As a writer, it is essential to be able to fully understand audience. Analyzing audience will help you determine the type of writing that should go into your work, how much material there needs to be, and other very important things that need to be considered when it comes to audience. There are many strategies for audience analysis, all of which are dependent upon the audience itself.

When audience analysis is performed, researchers find audience members’ demographics and then categorize audience into subgroups based on common traits among audience members. This helps researchers narrow down their audience to what they are specifically looking for in order to make the material more relatable to their target audience (ex: young adults, people in high school, etc.). Age group, sex, income level and occupation are all audience factors which can be categorized when audience analysis is performed.

Narrowing Down the Audience

When you’re audience is narrowed down it’s much easier to craft material that will better speak to your audience. Know your audience; know what they like, what they dislike, how much education they’ve had, what languages they speak, etc. Once audience is analyzed, writers can create a precise audience for their work and tailor the message to that audience specifically.

For Example

An audience analysis was performed on users of a digital note-taking application by simply observing how these audience members used the app. Researchers found that audience members were from all different backgrounds, with different jobs and levels of education.

The audience was then categorized by their use of the app. Those who used it mainly for work purposes were placed in one category, while those who used it mainly for personal purposes were placed in another.

This audience analysis helped researchers understand how to market the app to its target audience.

Audience Analysis Questions to Ask

There are a number of different ways to carry out audience analysis, but the most common approach is to ask yourself some key questions about your audience. These questions might include:

• Who is your audience?
• What do they want or need?
• What are their interests?
• Needs?
• Their pain points?
• Goals?
• Their age range?
• Gender?
• Income level?
• Where do they live?
• What are their political views?
• Their religious views?

Once you have answers to these questions, you can start to tailor your content and messaging to better meet the needs of your audience.

Audience Analysis with Audience in Mind

The audience is the most important aspect to consider when writing because without an audience, there can be no purpose. You need to create content that will be useful or interesting for your audience, and you may even want to think about tailoring your work so that it specifically targets them.

Adjustments for Young Readers

For example, if you’re writing a book for young people, you may want to include references to popular culture and modern technology like “bitcoin,” “blockchain,” “NFT profits,” “passive income,” “going viral,” “pandemic,” “click bait,” etc.

Older Audience

If you are writing book for an older audience, you may use cultural references and metaphors that they would be familiar with like “the good shepherd,” “the good Samaritan,” “melting pot,” “trickle-down theory,” “band-aid for the problem,” “black sheep of the family,” the “Greatest Generation,” etc.

Audience Analysis Strategies

There are several audience analysis strategies that can help you get started with your audience research. These strategies include:

Brainstorming in Audience Analysis

List the main topics or themes that you want to address in your writing, and then brainstorm audience groups that may be interested in those topics.

Surveys for Audience Analysis

Ask your audience directly what they’re looking for from your writing. This can be done through surveys, questionnaires or interviews.

Focus Groups

Get your audience together in a group setting to discuss their needs and interests.

Research

Do your own research on your audience, using data from secondary sources such as demographic surveys or social media analytics.

Once you have a good understanding of your audience, you can start to create content that appeals to them. This may involve adjusting your tone of voice, the topics you write about, or even the way you present information. audience analysis tips

Writing Tips for Good Audience Analysis

Here are a few audience analysis tips to help you get started:

Be Specific

Don’t just target a general audience, but try to identify smaller groups within that audience that may be more interested in your work.

Tailor Your Content

Don’t just make small changes, but take the time to rewrite your content so that it more closely meets audience needs.

Create a Buyer Persona

If you are copywriting to market something, consider who might be buying your work, and what they’ll use it for.

Run Surveys

Ask audience members to share their views with you. You can run online surveys through platforms like SurveyMonkey, or you might prefer to do face-to-face interviews or focus groups.

Use Social Media

Look at what people are talking about on social media and see if you can find any trends or patterns. Google Trends is a great website to research this.

Audience Targeting Examples

Here are a few audience targeting examples to help you understand the process better:

– A company that makes baby products might target new parents, expecting parents, and parents with young children.

– A financial advisor might target people who are interested in saving for retirement, buying a home, or starting a business.

– A website that sells pet supplies might target pet owners, people who are considering getting a pet, and people who work with animals.

Summary

By performing audience analysis before writing, you’ll be able to create content that appeals directly to your audience’s needs. This will increase the likelihood of them sharing your work with their audience, and it may even lead to new opportunities such as speaking engagements or collaborations.

Audience Analysis Tools

There are several audience analysis tools that you can use to get started with your audience research. These include:

– Google Analytics – Use this platform to analyze website statistics and audience demographics.

– SurveyMonkey – Conduct audience surveys, questionnaires and interviews.

– Social Platforms like Facebook and Twitter – Search for audience keywords on social media networks. audience analysis tools conclusion

– Google Trends – Search for what is topical, popular, and important both today and also historically. At this writing Google allows you to search for trending topics and phrases going all the way back to 2004.

By using audience analysis tools before writing, you’ll be able to better understand your audience’s needs and preferences. This will give you a good starting point when creating content that appeals to them.

Another Audience Analysis Example

Let’s take a closer look at an audience analysis example.

Say you’re a marketer who wants to create content that will help increase brand awareness.

You might target the following audience groups:

– People who are interested in marketing

– Those who are researching marketing strategies

– A group who have recently started a business audience analysis example conclusion

Audience Analysis Strategies

When it comes to audience analysis, writers have a couple of strategies they can use to help them cope.

First Strategy

The first is to take a step back and assess who their audience is. This can be done by taking into account things like the reader’s age, gender, location, and occupation. It’s also important to think about what the reader’s interests are, and what they might want to learn from the piece.

Second Strategy

The second strategy is to get to know the audience better by conducting research. This can be done by looking online for reader surveys, or by reading articles that have been written about similar topics. It’s also helpful to think about who the competition is, and what they’re doing to appeal to their audience.

Ultimately, it’s important for writers to remember that audience analysis is an ongoing process. The more they know about their audience, the better they can tailor their content to appeal to them. By using these strategies, writers can make sure that their content is relevant and engaging for their readers.

Audience Analysis Questions

There are a number of questions you can ask to help you conduct an audience analysis. These include:

– who is your audience?

– what are their demographics?

– their interests?

– needs?

– level of knowledge about your topic?

– what tone of voice should you use in your writing?

Strategies for Audience Engagement

Once you have a good understanding of your audience, it’s time to start thinking about how to reach them.

Effective writing strategies for audience engagement include:

– using catchy headlines and subheads

– starting with a strong lead

– using images and videos

– using persuasive language

– providing social media sharing buttons

– using call to action phrases

Also pay attention to the special needs of specific genres:

-Science fiction often features worlds that are very different from our own, so the audience is used to a certain level of deviation from reality.

-Mystery novels often require the audience to piece together clues along with the detective in order to solve the crime.

-Comedies usually rely on exaggerating common human foibles for laughs.

Summary

In theory, you have to know your audience and write for that audience. But in practice it’s not always easy for a technical writer to determine who that audience is. You should make sure your writing does not contain anything that would not be appropriate for your audience’s gender, age, educational background, and other similar demographic characteristics.

Audience Analysis Through Occupational Categories

Another way to understand your audience would be to classify it in terms of general OCCUPATIONAL categories like

SMEs

Subject Matter Experts know the product and service inside-out. Most of the time they design and test the product. They know everything that can be known about the topic/subject of your document. They are exclusively interested in the FEATURES of the product or system.

Technicians

Technicians are a little like SMEs. They also know a lot about the subject but mostly from a practical point of view. Technicians can for example install an alarm system with eyes closed but would not know why the alarm system was designed with only three levels of alarms, or if the system is designed to work at north of the polar circle. Such people are mostly interested in the FEATURES of the product or system.

Executives and Managers

Executives and managers have a general idea how the system works but they are more interested in project and product management, in financing, marketing, selling, promoting the product or system. They are mostly interested in the BENEFITS of the product or system.

Nonspecialists & Laypersons

Laypersons have very little or no technical information. They are also more interested in the BENEFITS that the product would provide rather than the technical features that yield such benefits.

Examples

For example, when you are writing for SMEs it would be redundant and actually offending to remind them to launch an application first. SMEs are the kind of people who would have the application launched and running on their machines all the time.

However, if you are writing for Nonspecialists you cannot assume that they have the application running. You might actually tell them exactly where to find the application’s icon before double clicking it to launch or explain how to use the Start menu to launch the application. Such elementary details would probably not go to waste when writing for nonspecialists.

If you are writing for managers and executives, summarize different modules of the system since they would focus on the market and financial performance of the product. Thus, you might want to include, for example, an EXECUTIVE SUMMARY, more pie charts in your document to explain the market share of the product and it’s standing with respect to competing products. You might want to use time-series graphics displaying historical trends.

Summary

Another way to characterize your audience is to categorize it by job titles and their position within an organization.

There are four main such audience categories: SMEs, technicians, managers & executives, and nonexperts.

Write your documents by taking into consideration what each group is capable of understanding easily and what each group expects from your document.

Best Practices Good for Any Audience

So what to do if we cannot always know for certain who our audience is?

Short answer is – stick to what is true for almost all audiences. Also you can apply single-sourcing methods to generate different documents appropriate for different possible audiences.

Many of such audience-safe writing methods are explained later in this course. But let’s remind some obvious ones without going into much detail.

Role of Jargon in Audience Analysis

Jargon cuts both ways. You should avoid it if you’re writing for a nontechnical audience. However for technical audiences jargon may build up your credibility in an instant. If SMEs hear that you are talking their lingo, establish a rapport and a sense of authenticity will be much easier. For example, if you are writing for air traffic controllers, to use the jargon term “deconflicting” would be the most natural thing to do. However, for an audience of general public, you’d be better off talking about “the rules and measures intended to decrease the risk of collision between aircraft.”

Index and Glossary

Always include an index and glossary, especially if your document is over 100 print pages. Regardless of the audience, use such navigational aids whenever you can. In Glossary explain each important abbreviation and acronym used in the document. You cannot go wrong with a well-constructed index and comprehensive glossary.

Watch Out Humor

Stay away from humor in your technical documents since it can backfire easily. What one audience finds hilarious can come across as deeply offensive to another.

The same goes for SLANG. Don’t use LOCAL DIALECTS either since what is “local” for one audience may be “totally unintelligible” for another.

Other Best General Practices for Audience Analysis

• Decide what to include and what to exclude according to your audience.
• Use examples, metaphors, and analogies that are appropriate for your audience.
• Provide enough background information and basic definitions.
• Pay attention to transitions between paragraphs and sections. Bolster such transitions by connective words and phrases like “therefore” “as a result of which” “on the basis of that” “for example” “however” etc.
• Use graphics, images and charts appropriate for your audience’s profile.
• Add supplementary information and cross-references appropriate for your audience’s profile.
• Use the time-tested methods of good writing like active voice and varying sentence lengths as explained later on in this course.

Summary

To make sure your document would be appropriate for as wide a spectrum of audiences as possible, apply the time-tested rules of good technical writing like avoiding humor, slang, and local dialects; including jargon for technical audiences; including an Index and a Glossary; and implementing other general rules listed.

EXERCISE: Types of Readers in Audience Analysis

Imagine you are writing on NUTRITION. That’s your topic.

Try to come up with at least one NUTRITION talking point appropriate for each of the following group of readers:

GROUP 1

A group of middle aged readers from all kinds of backgrounds who are trying to lose weight.

GROUP 2

A group of personal trainers who are trying to come up with a program that would cause their clients lose 10 pounds in a month.

GROUP 3

A group of biochemists and Certified Clinical Nutritionists (CCN) at the National Institute of Health doing research on the effect of carbohydrates on mental development.

EXERCISE: Rewrite Text for Different Occupational Categories

Write a SUMMARY of the technical report “Evaluation of Five Wind-Powered Electrical Systems” by David McMurry for two different occupational categories:

1. Executives & High-Level Management
2. Engineers

Source: https://www.prismnet.com/~hcexres/textbook/examples/compx2.html

(Provided thanks to Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License)

Suggested Solution

Provided at the end of this article.

Readability Indexes and Tools for Audience Analysis

How readable is your writing? How can you tailor it for different audiences?

Is there a good fit between what you’ve written and your audience?

This is a question that must be answered truthfully and precisely by all writers.

If your prose is not a good fit for your audience’s education level, then it won’t be understood and remembered easily.

That’s why many readability indexes, or measurement tools, have been developed over the years, allowing writers to measure and determine the kind of audience their prose is intended for.

The better known of these indexes are:

• Automated Readability Index (ARI)
• Flesch-Kinkaid Grade Level
• Gunning Fog Score
• Coleman-Liau Index
• Linsear Write Readability Formula
• SMOG Index
• Spache Score
• New Dale-Chall Score
• The Fry Readability Graph
• The Raygor Readability Estimate

Most of these indexes measure the level of education a typical reader would need to understand your text, like “7th Grade” or “12th Grade.” Higher the grade score, more difficult is your text and more education it would need to understand it.

Some like the Fry and Raygor readability graphs display not only the overall readability level of a text but also the beginning, middle and end of the text. That way you can understand how the difficulty level varies throughout the text flow.

The best way to understand how these different indexes work is to see them in action. Here is a list of practical hands-on tools you can use to measure the readability level of your essays, research papers, or any other type of writing assignment.

IMPORTANT: Please backup your text before using these online services and proceed at your own risk. As with anything else in life, please use caution, due diligence, and commonsense when using these free online services listed here for educational purposes only.

Readability Measurement Tools

Readability Test Tool https://www.webpagefx.com/tools/read-able/

Automated Readability Index Calculator http://www.readabilityformulas.com/free-readability-formula-tests.php

Measure Test Readability https://readable.io/text/

Test Document Readability https://www.online-utility.org/english/readability_test_and_improve.jsp

Readability Analyzer https://datayze.com/readability-analyzer.php

Perry Marshall Readability Analyzer https://www.perrymarshall.com/grade/

SMOG Grade Tester http://www.wordscount.info/hw/code_snippet.jsp

Microsoft Text Readability Tester http://www.wordscount.info/hw/code_snippet.jsp

Analyze My Writing http://www.analyzemywriting.com/

SUGGESTED SOLUTION – Rewrite Text for Different Occupational Categories

1.      For Executives & High-Level Management

“Wind-powered electrical systems play an important role in the electrification of many rural homesteads. There are many wind turbine models in the market today that provide such much-needed source of power in rural areas.

Although there is quite a variety of designs, three of the primary considerations in selecting a wind system are (a) power output, (b) durability, and (c) cost.

Power Output — The ideal wind system should charge the storage batteries faster than the electricity is consumed. Since a low-power wind system eventually charges the batteries, the rotor should have a low cut-in speed to take advantage of slow winds. To charge the batteries quickly, the generator should produce at least 2000 watts in a moderate wind speed.

Durability — Blades breaking as a result of the vibrations from high wind speeds is a major consideration with wind turbines. Brush wear is another problem that can be easily corrected by using the long-lasting brushes designed by Jacobs Wind Electric Plants. The turbines today have an average life of 20 to 30 years, depending on the model.

Cost – The cost of wind turbines varies between $2,000 and $12,000 dollars. An average household can expect to recoup the cost of installing a wind turbine in about three and a half years after the date of the purchase.”

2.      For Engineers

“The weakest point of a wind turbine is its blades and brushes. Special care must be taken in installing such parts.

Here is a table of various models and their main characteristics:

Table 1. Technical Summary of Wind Systems
Wind machine	Max. power/wind speed	Cut-in wind speed	Cost in dollars	Lifespan in years
Eagle	2000/20 mph	8-10	$4700	20
Kedco	1200/17 mph	—	2895	—
Dunlite	2000/25 mph	10	4500	30
Darrieus	4000/23 mph	motor start	8000	—
Zephyr	15000/30 mph	10	12000	—

The Eagle has proven itself to last about 20 years. The rotor uses a flyball governor to turn the blades and to vary the pitch of the wind. The brushes have also been designed for long life. Since the Eagle’s generator is directly turned by the rotor, no gears are needed, and the system lasts longer.

The Kedco uses aluminum blades that feather (or bend) in high winds. It also uses an automatic vibration sensor that shuts off the generator in turbulent winds.

The Dunlite has been on the market for 30 years and has proven itself to be reliable. The variable pitch blades are made of galvanized steel and are designed to withstand winds up to 80 mph. The Dunlite generator is designed without any brushes which gives the system longer life.

The Zephyr system uses glide-out spoilers on the blades to protect against overspeed. Because it is still in the testing phase, the lifetime is unknown at this time.

The vertical-axis Darrieus system is designed to withstand gusts of 130 mph. The vibration is kept at a minimum because the system’s center of gravity is along the rotor shaft.”

Source: https://www.prismnet.com/~hcexres/textbook/examples/compx2.html

(Original text by David McMurry is partially quoted as is and partially modified thanks to Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License)

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