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Audience Analysis

Audience analysis involves identifying the audience and adapting a speech to their interests, level of understanding, attitudes, and beliefs. Taking an audience-centered approach is important because a speaker’s effectiveness will be improved if the presentation is created and delivered in an appropriate manner. Identifying the audience through extensive research is often difficult, so audience adaptation often relies on the healthy use of imagination.

As with many valuable tools, audience analysis can be used to excess. Adapting a speech to an audience is not the same thing as simply telling an audience what they want to hear. Audience analysis does not mean ‘grandstanding’ or ‘kowtowing’ to a public. Rather, adaptation guides the stylistic and content choices a speaker makes for a presentation. Audience adaptation often involves walking a very fine line between over-adapting and under-adapting – a distinction that can be greater appreciated by understanding the general components of this skill. The Communications Department offers  tips for analyzing an audience .

Audience Analysis Factors

Audience expectations.

When people become audience members in a speech situation, they bring with them expectations about the occasion, topic, and speaker. Violating audience expectations can have a negative impact on the effectiveness of the speech. Imagine that a local politician is asked to speak at the memorial service for a beloved former mayor. The audience will expect the politician’s speech to praise the life and career of the deceased.

If the politician used the opportunity to discuss a piece of legislation, the audience would probably be offended and the speaker would lose credibility. Of course, there may be some situations when violating the audience’s expectations would be an effective strategy. Presenters that make political statements at the Academy Awards do so precisely because the message’s incongruity with the occasion increases the impact of the proclamation.

Knowledge of topic

Audience knowledge of a topic can vary widely on any given occasion, therefore, communicators should find out what their audience already knows about the topic. Never overestimate the audience’s knowledge of a topic. If a speaker launches into a technical discussion of genetic engineering but the listeners are not familiar with basic genetics, they will be unable to follow your speech and quickly lose interest. On the other hand, drastically underestimating the audience’s knowledge may result in a speech that sounds condescending.

Try to do some research to find out what the audience already knows about the topic. Giving a brief review of important terms and concepts is almost always appropriate, and can sometimes be done by acknowledging the heterogeneous audience and the importance of ‘putting everyone on the same page.’ For example, even if the audience members were familiar with basic genetics, a brief review of key term and concepts at the beginning of a speech refreshes memories without being patronizing.

Attitude toward topic

Knowing audience members’ attitudes about a topic will help a speaker determine the best way to reach their goals. Imagine that a presenter is trying to convince the community to build a park. A speaker would probably be inclined to spend the majority of the speech giving reasons why a park would benefit the community.

However, if they found out ahead of time that most neighbors thought the park was a good idea but they were worried about safety issues, then the speaker could devote their time to showing them that park users would be safer in the park than they currently are playing in the streets. The persuasive power of the speech is thus directed at the most important impediment to the building of a park.

Audience size

Many elements of speech-making change in accordance with audience size. In general, the larger the audience the more formal the presentation should be. Sitting down and using common language when speaking to a group of 10 people is often quite appropriate. However, that style of presentation would probably be inappropriate or ineffective if you were speaking to 1,000 people. Large audiences often require that you use a microphone and speak from an elevated platform.

Demographics

The demographic factors of an audience include age, gender, religion, ethnic background, class, sexual orientation, occupation, education, group membership, and countless other categories. Since these categories often organize individual’s identities and experiences, a wise speaker attends to the them. Politicians usually pay a great deal of attention to demographic factors when they are on the campaign trail. If a politician speaks in Day County, Florida (the county with the largest elderly population) they will likely discuss the issues that are more relevant to people in that age range – Medicare and Social Security.

Communicators must be careful about stereotyping an audience based on demographic information – individuals are always more complicated than a simplistic identity category. Also, be careful not to pander exclusively to interests based on demographics. For example, the elderly certainly are concerned with political issues beyond social security and Medicare. Using demographic factors to guide speech-making does not mean changing the goal of the speech for every different audience; rather, consider what pieces of information (or types of evidence) will be most important for members of different demographic groups.

The setting of a presentation can influence the ability to give a speech and the audience’s ability and desire to listen. Some of these factors are: the set-up of the room (both size and how the audience is arranged), time of day, temperature, external noises (lawn mowers, traffic), internal noises (babies crying, hacking coughs), and type of space (church, schoolroom, outside). Finding out ahead of time the different factors going into the setting will allow a speaker to adapt their speech appropriately. Will there be a stage? Will there be a podium or lectern? What technology aids will be available? How are the seats arranged? What is the order of speakers?

While these issues may appear minor compared to the content of the speech and the make-up of the audience, this foreknowledge will soothe nerves, assist in developing eye contact, and ensure that the appropriate technology, if necessary, is available. Take into account the way that the setting will affect audience attention and participation. People are usually tired after a meal and late in the day. If scheduled to speak at 1:00 PM, a speaker may have to make the speech more entertaining through animation or humor, exhibit more enthusiasm, or otherwise involve the audience in order to keep their attention.

Voluntariness

Audiences are either voluntary, in which case they are genuinely interested in what a presenter has to say, or involuntary, in which case they are not inherently interested in the presentation. Knowing the difference will assist in establishing how hard a speaker needs to work to spark the interest of the audience. Involuntary audiences are notoriously hard to generate and maintain interest in a topic (think about most people’s attitudes toward classes or mandatory meetings they would prefer to not attend.)

Egocentrism

Most audience members are egocentric: they are generally most interested in things that directly affect them or their community. An effective speaker must be able to show their audience why the topic they are speaking on should be important to them.

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How to Analyse your Audience for a Speech

March 2, 2021 - Sophie Thompson

This article will teach you how to perform audience analysis for your speech or presentation and the different types of audience you might encounter. The type of audience affects the choice of language, humour, opening sentences, length and many more.

Here is a great overview from the  University of Pittsburgh :

Audience analysis involves identifying the audience and adapting a speech to their interests, level of understanding, attitudes, and beliefs. Taking an audience-cantered approach is important because a speaker’s effectiveness will be improved if the presentation is created and delivered in an appropriate manner. Identifying the audience through extensive research is often difficult, so audience adaptation often relies on the healthy use of imagination.

Four types of audience

This audience does not want to be listening to you. This could be for many reasons, from not liking the organisation you are representing, to wanting to get home and watch their favourite TV show.

They can be openly hostile and disagree with you. If audience analysis shows that you’ll be faced with this audience (e.g. you have the last slot of a busy day of presentation), consider the following:

  • Work hard on  developing trust  and interest
  • Construct your presentation from an area of agreement or point of disagreement
  • Use plenty of references and data to back up your points
  • Challenge them, ask questions during your speech and engage them

Change speech if faced with a hostile audience

Speaking to a hostile audience? Make sure you understand the type of audience you will be up against and build you speech accordingly.

2. Critical

Often at technical conferences, you get critical people who believe they are extremely intelligent and relish the thought of proving part of your presentation incorrect. Use the following techniques:

  • Use lots of evidence with strong references
  • Argue both sides of the case, clearly stating pros and cons of each
  • Try not to exaggerate, keep to the facts

3. Uninformed

This is the most common type of audience you will encounter. They might know a little about your presentation topic but certainly not in great detail.

  • Open up with questions so you can understand the level of knowledge on your topic
  • Spend a few slides going over the basics of your topic
  • Use  simple language  and avoid acronyms
  • Give basic facts and try to relate information to something people understand (e.g. if talking about space and using huge numbers, relate them to things people can comprehend)

4. Sympathetic

This audience is willing to listen and wants to be there. They can be interested in your topic, excited to see you talk (you might be a well-known figure in your speaking field), have an emotional attachment – these people are the easiest to persuade.

  • Use the state of this audience to ask for help / funding etc.
  • Trigger emotions which powerful stories

Understand what time your speech is at and how the audience will be feeling

People checking their watches? Make sure you understand the situation your audience is in. If your presentation is the last of the day, you’ll most likely have a hostile audience. Take this into account and structure your speech accordingly.

Different personalities in a meeting

The following section discusses the four types of  audience personalities  and an audience analysis on them.

  • Scrupulous about preparation before and after meetings
  • Arrives on time, keeps to time and prevents drift
  • Takes very detailed minutes and listens intently
  • Reflects on discussion, makes considered contributions
  • Drives decision making and ensures time is not wasted
  • Cuts across distractions and leads meetings well
  • Manages difficult people assertively
  • Ensures the action plan is implemented
  • Builds rapport easily and connects people together
  • Remembers coffee, cake and connects people together
  • Averts conflict, when it threatens
  • Supports the team and leader fully
  • Entertains, engages when in the limelight
  • Challenges old way of thinking
  • Generates creative ideas and opens new possibilities
  • Tells the truth, brings on debate, breaks through niceties

Features of each personality:

Analytical  – 100% accurate, chronology, don’t rush, focus on facts, internally focussed, distant from others, systematic, critical

Driver  – 100% task, headlines, don’t waste time, focus on action, future focused, leading others, quick to decide, impatient

Amiable  – 100% social, relationships, don’t intimidate, focus on feelings, present focused, asks questions, dislike conflict, support, kind

Expressive  – 100% impulsive, vision & ideas, don’t limit, focus on themes, externally focused, makes statements, competitive & chaotic, unpredictable, energetic

How to gauge the audiences interest

Greet people before your speech.

This is a great way to perform early audience analysis. If possible, stand near the entrance and  greet people  as they come in. Ask them questions to gauge their level of knowledge and expectations. Example questions can be “what industry are working in?” and “how long they have been working at…”

Call and Response Technique

Ask carefully  prepared questions  at the beginning of you speech to understand the mood and experience of the audience. You could ask “Raise your hand if you have used a virtual reality headset before” for example.

Research the Event

Read up about the conference you are attending. Find out what the other presentations are about and how they might relate to your speech to give you a head start on audience analysis. This gives you an idea of how technical and prepared your audience might be.

For additional information on understanding your audience and audience analysis, read:

  • Know your Audience: What it Takes to Persuade, Inspire and Motivate them
  • Public Speaking: Know Your Audience

Key audience analysis factors

Audience expectations.

Different audiences can have completely  different expectations  about the topics and speaker. Ignoring these differences can have a negative effect on your speech. Imagine that you’re asked to speak at the memorial service for a close friend.

The audience will expect your speech to praise the life of the deceased. If you start talking about the flaws of the person, the audience is likely to react badly to it.

Knowledge of topic

You need to find out how much your audience already knows about your topic as an audiences knowledge can vary widely. Two ways to achieve this could be:

  • Research who else is speaking at the event and the topics they are presenting (if it’s been made public)
  • Gauge the type of people who will attend using the event website or social media profiles

Never overestimate the audience’s knowledge of a topic. If you start speaking about complex algorithms for robotics, but the listeners are not familiar with basic genetics, they’ll quickly lose interest and find something to distract themselves with.

On the other hand, drastically underestimating the audience’s knowledge may result in a speech that sounds condescending.

Large conference room

Presentation setting, such as what time you are presenting and style of the conference room, will influence audience’s ability and desire to listen.

Finding out ahead of time the different environment and situational factors. This will give you plenty of time to prepare for an audience of 1000 when you were expecting 50. You want to understand whether there will be a stage, where your slides will be shown, what technology is available to you, who is presenting before you and other factors.

Take into account the way that the setting will affect audience attention and participation. If you’re scheduled to speak at the end of the day, you’ll have to make the speech more entertaining and appear more enthusiasm to keep their attention.

Read more about how to  speak to an unruly crowd  if you’re stuck with an end of day presentation slot.

Audience size

Your speech will change depending on the size of the audience. In general, the larger the audience the more formal the presentation should be. Using everyday language when speaking to a group of 5 people is often appropriate.

However, you’ll need a well throughout structure and  literary techniques  when talking to 500 people. Large audiences often require that you use a microphone and speak from an elevated platform.

Attitude toward topic

Being able to understand the audiences attitudes about a topic will help you connect with them. Imagine you’re trying to convince people at a town hall to build a new college. You’ll be inclined to spend the majority of the speech giving reasons why a college would benefit the town.

If you find that the major worry was how much this would cost students, you can talk more about funding available to the students. The  persuasive power  of the speech is therefore directed at the most important obstacle to the building the college.

Demographics

The demographic factors of an audience include:

  • Ethnic background
  • Job or Career

These categories often underpin the individuals experiences and beliefs, so you should tailor your speech accordingly. Presenting at a conference in London will be a very different experience to presenting in Shanghai. The structure of your speech and words you use will probably be very different.

Using demographic factors to guide speech-making does not mean changing the goal of the speech for every different audience; rather, consider what pieces of information will be most important for members of different demographic groups.

Voluntariness

Audiences are either hostile, critical, uninformed or sympathetic. Knowing the difference will assist in establishing the content of your speech. It’s very hard to generate and maintain interest with a hostile audience. You’ll definitely want to know if you’re up against this so you can plan ahead for it.

Egocentrism

Most audience members are interested in things that directly affect them or their company. An effective speaker must be able to show their audience why the topic they are speaking on should be important to them.

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Audience Analysis in Public Speaking: Knowing Your Audience

audience-analysis

Public speaking can be a daunting task, but with the right preparation and audience analysis it can become an enjoyable experience. Audience analysis in public speaking is essential to understand who you are addressing before delivering your speech or presentation.

By analyzing your audience, you will have greater insight into their needs and interests which will enable you to better tailor your message for maximum impact.

In this blog post we’ll explore what audience analysis is, why it’s important, how to analyze your audience effectively, four types of audiences that require different approaches when giving presentations and some tips for engaging them during the delivery of the presentation.

What is Audience Analysis?

Audience assessment entails accumulating and evaluating data concerning a crowd to gain greater comprehension of their necessities, preferences, and anticipations when delivering an address or presentation. It helps speakers tailor their message to the specific audience they are addressing.

Knowing your audience is key in order to create a successful speech or presentation. An effective speaker will take into account who they are speaking to before creating content for their talk. Audience analysis involves researching the demographic makeup of your listeners as well as understanding what topics may be relevant or interesting for them.

To begin, it’s important to identify the size and composition of your audience. Are you speaking to a large group? A small one? Is it mostly made up of professionals from a certain industry? Or students from different backgrounds?

Knowing this can help you adjust your tone accordingly—for example, if you’re talking with colleagues in the same field then technical terms may be more appropriate than if you were presenting at an elementary school assembly.

Next, consider what topics might be of particular interest to your audience. If possible, try inquiring ahead of time as to the expectations and needs they may have from the presentation. This way you can ensure that all content provided is relevant and useful for those in attendance rather than wasting their time on superfluous details which are not pertinent.

Additionally, familiarizing yourself with current events related to the topic at hand will also help provide some context before diving into more intricate discussion points later on in the talk.

When preparing material for delivery it’s essential not only to think about how best serve those attending but also how best represent yourself as a professional speaker or presenter too.

Make sure any visuals used during presentations match both yours and your audiences’ style – graphics should be simple yet informative enough so everyone understands without feeling overwhelmed by excessive detail (or lack thereof).

Additionally using humor appropriately can add levity while still staying within professional boundaries – just make sure jokes don’t come off as offensive or inappropriate given who’s listening.

Finally remember that even after doing research there may still be unexpected surprises when giving speeches; always remain flexible so adjustments can easily be made depending on feedback received during Q&A sessions afterwards.

Being able to quickly respond positively (and constructively) shows confidence which makes people more likely trust what being said overall – regardless if its something they agree with initially or not.

By taking these steps into consideration prior to delivering any type of public address, it ensures maximum success no matter who is listening – whether it’s family, friends, coworkers or peers. Having knowledge beforehand allows speakers to stay focused on the task at hand while making sure all attendees leave satisfied too.

Audience evaluation is a fundamental part of public speaking, helping to recognize and comprehend the expectations and inclinations of your crowd. By taking this step, you can better tailor your message to ensure maximum impact – so let’s take a look at why audience analysis is so important.

Key Takeaway: Audience analysis is essential for successful public speaking, as it helps to tailor content and delivery style to the specific audience being addressed.

Why is Audience Analysis Important?

Audience analysis is a critical part of public speaking. It allows speakers to adjust their message in order to better connect with their audience . Comprehending the desires, fascinations, and outlooks of the listeners can help speakers create a more successful address that resonates with their hearers.

Understanding your audience helps you tailor your message for maximum impact. For example, if you’re giving a presentation on business strategy to an executive team at a large company, you’ll want to focus on topics like competitive advantage and financial forecasting rather than basic marketing concepts or customer service techniques.

Analyzing your audience is essential in order to determine the level of detail required for each topic discussed. If the crowd is not as informed, then more in-depth explanations and illustrations could be necessary to guarantee that everyone understands what’s being discussed; however, if it is a knowledgeable group of experts who are already familiar with the subject matter, further elucidation or examples may not be essential.

Knowing who will be attending your presentation also gives you insight into potential questions or objections from the crowd which can help shape how you address certain points during your talk as well as provide ideas for further discussion afterwords should time permit it.

Additionally by analyzing demographics such as age range and gender distribution this could influence language choices made throughout the speech as well as visual aids used when presenting slideshows or other visuals during the event itself.

Analyzing one’s audience can give clues about cultural sensitivities which must be taken into account when crafting any kind of message intended for public consumption.

This includes avoiding jokes or references that could potentially offend members of certain groups, while still maintaining a level of levity so that people remain engaged throughout its duration without feeling uneasy due to overly serious content being presented too frequently within the timeframe allotted by its presenter(s).

Audience analysis is an essential part of public speaking and helps to ensure that the message resonates with the audience. Gaining an understanding of the audience’s identity, interests and how to effectively engage them can help create a more powerful presentation that will stay with them. Now let’s explore how to analyze your audience.

Key Takeaway: Gauging the crowd is imperative for producing a triumphant oratorical occasion, to customize the proclamation and demonstration to their necessities, fascinations, prospects, and cultural susceptibilities.

How to Analyze Your Audience?

Analyzing your audience is a critical step in preparing for any public speaking engagement. It involves researching who will be attending your presentation and what topics they may be interested in hearing about.

Knowing the makeup of your audience can help you tailor your message to ensure that it resonates with them, as well as provide insights into potential biases or preconceived notions they may have about the topic you are discussing.

Think about the age, gender, work status, education and cultural roots of those you are addressing when assessing your crowd. These factors can give you insight into how receptive they might be to certain ideas or concepts that you plan on presenting during your speech.

Additionally, take into account any cultural differences between yourself and the members of the audience; this could affect how people perceive what you’re saying and whether or not they connect with it emotionally.

It is likewise essential to research any current opinions that people may have regarding the subject matter before beginning your analysis process; this way, if there are conflicting views present within the room when delivering a speech , then you will be aware of which areas require extra attention so that everyone feels heard and respected regardless of their convictions or perspectives on a particular issue.

Finally, make sure to pay attention to body language during both pre-speech conversations with individual attendees as well as while delivering your presentation itself. This will allow for more accurate assessment of how engaged people are with what’s being said and where adjustments need to be made accordingly in order for everyone involved, including yourself, to get something out of it.

Grasping the requirements and anticipations of your listeners can aid you in customizing your speech to fulfill their expectations. This portion of the discourse will examine four potential assemblages that could be encountered when giving an address.

Key Takeaway: Audience analysis is essential to public speaking, as it helps tailor messages to the audience and ensures everyone feels heard and respected.

Four types of audience

Hostile audiences.

When dealing with hostile audiences, it is important for speakers to remain composed while still responding firmly and politely whenever necessary. Having counter-arguments ready ahead of time can help defuse situations quickly before they get out of control.

Critical Audiences

When dealing with critical audiences, it is important for speakers to present clear evidence to support their claims while avoiding any unnecessary tangents that could potentially derail the conversation. This will ensure success when facing these crowds and help everyone remain enlightened rather than confused afterwards.

Uninformed Audiences

When dealing with uninformed audiences, it is important for speakers to put in extra effort to simplify complex concepts and break down complicated ideas into easily digestible chunks. This will ensure that even the most novice of learners are able to follow along easily and later recall the main points discussed accurately if need arises at a later date.

Sympathetic Audiences

Sympathetic crowds often comprise mostly supporters, meaning majority of attendees likely already agree with whatever position is taken up front. Despite this fact, it is still essential to provide solid proof backing statements made in order to avoid becoming complacent.

Rest assured that everyone will be fully convinced by the conclusions drawn and the end result expected outcome achieved once finished speaking altogether. Finally, wrap things up nicely with a neat bow on top off a successful performance overall – well done job indeed. There is no doubt whatsoever there.

Gaining insight into the four distinct groups of listeners and their requirements is a must for an effective talk; following these pointers can guarantee that your crowd will stay captivated and keen on what you are conveying.

Key Takeaway: Analyzing your audience before delivering a speech or presentation is essential for achieving desired outcomes and making sure that everyone remains enlightened and convinced. Knowing who you are talking to helps tailor the message for maximum impact.

Tips for Engaging Your Audience

Engaging your audience is essential to delivering an effective speech or presentation . To do this, you should use storytelling techniques such as anecdotes and metaphors to illustrate points and keep listeners engaged throughout your talk.

Anecdotes are concise narratives that can be used to elucidate a concept or idea in an accessible manner. For example, if you’re giving a presentation on the importance of teamwork, you could tell an anecdote about how one person was able to accomplish something great with the help of their team members.

Metaphors are also useful for making complex ideas easier to understand by comparing them to something more familiar. For instance, if you’re talking about the power of collaboration, you could compare it to two gears working together – each gear needs the other in order for both of them to work properly.

Asking questions during your presentation is another great way to engage your audience and ensure that everyone is following along with what you’re saying. You can ask rhetorical questions (questions without answers) that will get people thinking about what they just heard or direct questions where someone from the audience can answer directly.

Additionally, asking open-ended questions encourages discussion among attendees which helps make sure everyone stays focused on what’s being said instead of getting distracted by their phones or laptops.

Using visuals such as charts, graphs and pictures can also help keep people interested in what you have to say since these types of images are often easier for audiences to process than long blocks of text alone would be.

Additionally, using props like physical objects related to your topic can add interest and create visual aids that further enhance understanding for those who may not be familiar with certain concepts already discussed during your talk.

Finally, don’t forget humor. Using humor appropriately throughout presentations adds levity while still keeping things professional – plus it’s always nice when speakers show some personality too. Humor doesn’t have to be limited only to jokes either; puns or lighthearted observations all count as well so feel free to experiment here until you find something that works best for the particular group listening.

By understanding the importance of audience analysis and implementing the tips discussed, you can ensure that your presentation engages and resonates with your audience. Now, let’s progress to analyzing our findings and leveraging them for delivering an impactful message.

Key Takeaway: A key takeaway from this is to engage your audience by using storytelling techniques , asking questions, incorporating visuals and props, and adding humor.

By understanding who will be attending your presentation and what their preconceived notions may be, you can craft a more effective speech that resonates with those listening.

Additionally, using storytelling techniques such as anecdotes or metaphors and asking questions throughout your talk can help engage your audience and ensure that everyone follows along with what you’re saying.

Maintain gaze with the listeners while articulating to ensure they are being spoken to directly. It’s also helpful to use hand gestures when appropriate to emphasize certain points or ideas being discussed. Finally, don’t forget to pause periodically so people have time to process what has been said before moving on.

At the end of your talk , thank everyone for coming out and reiterate some of the key points from earlier in order to leave a lasting impression on those present. If possible, provide resources such as books or websites where people can find additional information about the topic at hand if they wish further explore it after leaving your event.

By taking these steps during preparation and delivery of a public speaking engagement , speakers can ensure that their message reaches its intended audience in an effective manner, leading to better understanding between both parties involved.

Thanking everyone for coming out and reiterating some of the key points from earlier can leave a lasting impression on those present. If possible, providing resources such as books or websites where people can find additional information about the topic at hand allows them to further explore it after leaving your event.

FAQs in Relation to Audience Analysis in Public Speaking

1. demographic analysis:.

This type of analysis involves gathering information about the audience’s age, gender, education level, and other demographic characteristics. By understanding these factors, public speakers can tailor their messages to better connect with their listeners.

2. Psychographic Analysis:

This type of analysis looks at the values, attitudes and interests of an audience in order to craft a message that resonates with them on a deeper level. It helps public speakers understand what motivates people and how they might respond to certain topics or ideas presented during a speech.

3. Behavioral Analysis:

This type of analysis focuses on analyzing the behavior patterns of an audience before, during and after a presentation in order to gauge how effective it was for them as well as identify areas for improvement for future presentations. Public speakers can use this data to make adjustments accordingly so that their speeches are more impactful going forward.

What is an example of audience analysis?

Audience assessment is a method of accumulating and assessing details about a specific audience to better comprehend their requirements, interests, and activities.

This can include researching demographic data such as age, gender, education level, income level, occupation or job title; psychographic data such as values and attitudes; geographic data such as location; or other types of data related to the audience’s preferences.

By understanding this information about an audience before delivering a speech or presentation, public speakers can tailor their message to be more effective for that particular group.

1. Demographics:

This category involves analyzing the age, gender, occupation, education level and cultural background of the audience.

2. Psychographics:

This category looks at how people think and feel about a particular topic or issue. It includes values, attitudes, beliefs and lifestyle choices that can influence how an audience responds to a message.

3. Geographic:

Analyzing where the audience is located geographically helps determine what kind of language they may be more familiar with as well as any regional nuances that should be taken into account when crafting a message for them.

4. Behavioral Analysis:

Examining past behaviors related to public speaking can help speakers better understand their audiences’ expectations and reactions in order to tailor their presentation accordingly.

5 . Situational Analysis:

Taking into account the context in which an event takes place (such as whether it’s online or in-person) is essential for making sure all necessary accommodations are made so everyone has access to the same information during a presentation or speech

What are the 4 areas of audience analysis?

This involves understanding the age, gender, education level, and cultural background of the audience. Knowing these factors can help tailor a presentation to best suit their needs.

2. Comprehending the amount of familiarity the crowd holds concerning the subject matter being talked about is crucial so that one can deliver it in an appropriate way for them to totally comprehend.

3. Realizing the interests and opinions of your crowd in relation to the topic at hand will help you form a presentation that not only supplies them with facts, but also appeals to their emotions.

4. Expectations & goals : Knowing what expectations and goals your audience has regarding your presentation will enable you to create content that meets or exceeds those expectations while helping them reach their desired outcome from attending your talk or event.

Audience analysis in public speaking is a crucial step to ensure your message resonates with the audience. It helps you tailor your speech and presentation to best engage and connect with them.

Analyzing the people you are addressing, their preferences, necessities, convictions and views can assist you with crafting a successful communication plan that will have an enduring effect on your listeners. With proper audience analysis in place, you can be sure that your message will reach its intended target successfully.

The importance of audience analysis in public speaking cannot be overstated. Knowing your target audience is key to delivering an effective message that resonates with them.

By understanding their values, interests and motivations you can craft a speech tailored to the needs of the group or individual. To ensure success, take time before every presentation to analyze who will be listening so you can deliver an impactful performance that engages and inspires!

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5.2 Three Types of Audience Analysis

Learning objectives.

  • Understand how to gather and use demographic information.
  • Understand how to gather and use psychographic information.
  • Understand how to gather and use situational information.

A large audience applauding

Thinkmedialabs – Audience – CC BY-NC 2.0.

While audience analysis does not guarantee against errors in judgment, it will help you make good choices in topic, language, style of presentation, and other aspects of your speech. The more you know about your audience, the better you can serve their interests and needs. There are certainly limits to what we can learn through information collection, and we need to acknowledge that before making assumptions, but knowing how to gather and use information through audience analysis is an essential skill for successful speakers.

Demographic Analysis

As indicated earlier, demographic information includes factors such as gender, age range, marital status, race and ethnicity, and socioeconomic status. In your public speaking class, you probably already know how many students are male and female, their approximate ages, and so forth. But how can you assess the demographics of an audience ahead of time if you have had no previous contact with them? In many cases, you can ask the person or organization that has invited you to speak; it’s likely that they can tell you a lot about the demographics of the people who are expected to come to hear you.

Whatever method you use to gather demographics, exercise respect from the outset. For instance, if you are collecting information about whether audience members have ever been divorced, be aware that not everyone will want to answer your questions. You can’t require them to do so, and you may not make assumptions about their reluctance to discuss the topic. You must allow them their privacy.

There are certain things you can learn about an audience based on age. For instance, if your audience members are first-year college students, you can assume that they have grown up in the post-9/11 era and have limited memory of what life was like before the “war on terror.” If your audience includes people in their forties and fifties, it is likely they remember a time when people feared they would contract the AIDS virus from shaking hands or using a public restroom. People who are in their sixties today came of age during the 1960s, the era of the Vietnam War and a time of social confrontation and experimentation. They also have frames of reference that contribute to the way they think, but it may not be easy to predict which side of the issues they support.

Gender can define human experience. Clearly, most women have had a different cultural experience from that of men within the same culture. Some women have found themselves excluded from certain careers. Some men have found themselves blamed for the limitations imposed on women. In books such as You Just Don’t Understand and Talking from 9 to 5 , linguist Deborah Tannen has written extensively on differences between men’s and women’s communication styles. Tannen explains, “This is not to say that all women and all men, or all boys and girls, behave any one way. Many factors influence our styles, including regional and ethnic backgrounds, family experience and individual personality. But gender is a key factor, and understanding its influence can help clarify what happens when we talk” (Tannen, 1994).

Marriage tends to impose additional roles on both men and women and divorce even more so, especially if there are children. Even if your audience consists of young adults who have not yet made occupational or marital commitments, they are still aware that gender and the choices they make about issues such as careers and relationships will influence their experience as adults.

In past generations, Americans often used the metaphor of a “melting pot” to symbolize the assimilation of immigrants from various countries and cultures into a unified, harmonious “American people.” Today, we are aware of the limitations in that metaphor, and have largely replaced it with a multiculturalist view that describes the American fabric as a “patchwork” or a “mosaic.” We know that people who immigrate do not abandon their cultures of origin in order to conform to a standard American identity. In fact, cultural continuity is now viewed as a healthy source of identity.

We also know that subcultures and cocultures exist within and alongside larger cultural groups. For example, while we are aware that Native American people do not all embrace the same values, beliefs, and customs as mainstream white Americans, we also know that members of the Navajo nation have different values, beliefs, and customs from those of members of the Sioux or the Seneca. We know that African American people in urban centers like Detroit and Boston do not share the same cultural experiences as those living in rural Mississippi. Similarly, white Americans in San Francisco may be culturally rooted in the narrative of distant ancestors from Scotland, Italy, or Sweden or in the experience of having emigrated much more recently from Australia, Croatia, or Poland.

Not all cultural membership is visibly obvious. For example, people in German American and Italian American families have widely different sets of values and practices, yet others may not be able to differentiate members of these groups. Differences are what make each group interesting and are important sources of knowledge, perspectives, and creativity.

There is wide variability in religion as well. The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life found in a nationwide survey that 84 percent of Americans identify with at least one of a dozen major religions, including Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism, Islam, Hinduism, and others. Within Christianity alone, there are half a dozen categories including Roman Catholic, Mormon, Jehovah’s Witness, Orthodox (Greek and Russian), and a variety of Protestant denominations. Another 6 percent said they were unaffiliated but religious, meaning that only one American in ten is atheist, agnostic, or “nothing in particular” (Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, 2008).

Even within a given denomination, a great deal of diversity can be found. For instance, among Roman Catholics alone, there are people who are devoutly religious, people who self-identify as Catholic but do not attend mass or engage in other religious practices, and others who faithfully make confession and attend mass but who openly question Papal doctrine on various issues. Catholicism among immigrants from the Caribbean and Brazil is often blended with indigenous religion or with religion imported from the west coast of Africa. It is very different from Catholicism in the Vatican.

The dimensions of diversity in the religion demographic are almost endless, and they are not limited by denomination. Imagine conducting an audience analysis of people belonging to an individual congregation rather than a denomination: even there, you will most likely find a multitude of variations that involve how one was brought up, adoption of a faith system as an adult, how strictly one observes religious practices, and so on.

Yet, even with these multiple facets, religion is still a meaningful demographic lens. It can be an indicator of probable patterns in family relationships, family size, and moral attitudes.

Group Membership

In your classroom audience alone, there will be students from a variety of academic majors. Every major has its own set of values, goals, principles, and codes of ethics. A political science student preparing for law school might seem to have little in common with a student of music therapy, for instance. In addition, there are other group memberships that influence how audience members understand the world. Fraternities and sororities, sports teams, campus organizations, political parties, volunteerism, and cultural communities all provide people with ways of understanding the world as it is and as we think it should be.

Because public speaking audiences are very often members of one group or another, group membership is a useful and often easy to access facet of audience analysis. The more you know about the associations of your audience members, the better prepared you will be to tailor your speech to their interests, expectations, and needs.

Education is expensive, and people pursue education for many reasons. Some people seek to become educated, while others seek to earn professional credentials. Both are important motivations. If you know the education levels attained by members of your audience, you might not know their motivations, but you will know to what extent they could somehow afford the money for an education, afford the time to get an education, and survive educational demands successfully.

The kind of education is also important. For instance, an airplane mechanic undergoes a very different kind of education and training from that of an accountant or a software engineer. This means that not only the attained level of education but also the particular field is important in your understanding of your audience.

People choose occupations for reasons of motivation and interest, but their occupations also influence their perceptions and their interests. There are many misconceptions about most occupations. For instance, many people believe that teachers work an eight-hour day and have summers off. When you ask teachers, however, you might be surprised to find out that they take work home with them for evenings and weekends, and during the summer, they may teach summer school as well as taking courses in order to keep up with new developments in their fields. But even if you don’t know those things, you would still know that teachers have had rigorous generalized and specialized qualifying education, that they have a complex set of responsibilities in the classroom and the institution, and that, to some extent, they have chosen a relatively low-paying occupation over such fields as law, advertising, media, fine and performing arts, or medicine. If your audience includes doctors and nurses, you know that you are speaking to people with differing but important philosophies of health and illness. Learning about those occupational realities is important in avoiding wrong assumptions and stereotypes. We insist that you not assume that nurses are merely doctors “lite.” Their skills, concerns, and responsibilities are almost entirely different, and both are crucially necessary to effective health care.

Psychographic Analysis

Earlier, we mentioned psychographic information, which includes such things as values, opinions, attitudes, and beliefs. Authors Grice and Skinner present a model in which values are the basis for beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors (Grice & Skinner, 2009). Values are the foundation of their pyramid model. They say, “A value expresses a judgment of what is desirable and undesirable, right and wrong, or good and evil. Values are usually stated in the form of a word or phrase. For example, most of us probably share the values of equality, freedom, honesty, fairness, justice, good health, and family. These values compose the principles or standards we use to judge and develop our beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors.”

It is important to recognize that, while demographic information as discussed in Section 5.2.1 “Demographic Analysis” is fairly straightforward and verifiable, psychographic information is much less clear-cut. Two different people who both say they believe in equal educational opportunity may have very different interpretations of what “equal opportunity” means. People who say they don’t buy junk food may have very different standards for what specific kinds of foods are considered “junk food.”

We also acknowledge that people inherit some values from their family upbringing, cultural influences, and life experiences. The extent to which someone values family loyalty and obedience to parents, thrift, humility, and work may be determined by these influences more than by individual choice.

Psychographic analysis can reveal preexisting notions that limit your audience’s frame of reference. By knowing about such notions ahead of time, you can address them in your speech. Audiences are likely to have two basic kinds of preexisting notions: those about the topic and those about the speaker.

Preexisting Notions about Your Topic

Many things are a great deal more complex than we realize. Media stereotypes often contribute to our oversimplifications. For instance, one of your authors, teaching public speaking in the past decade, was surprised to hear a student claim that “the hippies meant well, but they did it wrong.” Aside from the question of the “it” that was done wrong, there was a question about how little the student actually knew about the diverse hippy cultures and their aspirations. The student seemed unaware that some of “the hippies” were the forebears of such things as organic bakeries, natural food co-ops, urban gardens, recycling, alternative energy, wellness, and other arguably positive developments.

It’s important to know your audience in order to make a rational judgment about how their views of your topic might be shaped. In speaking to an audience that might have differing definitions, you should take care to define your terms in a clear, honest way.

At the opposite end from oversimplification is the level of sophistication your audience might embody. Your audience analysis should include factors that reveal it. Suppose you are speaking about trends in civil rights in the United States. You cannot pretend that advancement of civil rights is virtually complete nor can you claim that no progress has been made. It is likely that in a college classroom, the audience will know that although much progress has been made, there are still pockets of prejudice, discrimination, and violence. When you speak to an audience that is cognitively complex, your strategy must be different from one you would use for an audience that is less educated in the topic. With a cognitively complex audience, you must acknowledge the overall complexity while stating that your focus will be on only one dimension. With an audience that’s uninformed about your topic, that strategy in a persuasive speech could confuse them; they might well prefer a black-and-white message with no gray areas. You must decide whether it is ethical to represent your topic this way.

When you prepare to do your audience analysis, include questions that reveal how much your audience already knows about your topic. Try to ascertain the existence of stereotyped, oversimplified, or prejudiced attitudes about it. This could make a difference in your choice of topic or in your approach to the audience and topic.

Preexisting Notions about You

People form opinions readily. For instance, we know that students form impressions of teachers the moment they walk into our classrooms on the first day. You get an immediate impression of our age, competence, and attitude simply from our appearance and nonverbal behavior. In addition, many have heard other students say what they think of us.

The same is almost certainly true of you. But it’s not always easy to get others to be honest about their impressions of you. They’re likely to tell you what they think you want to hear. Sometimes, however, you do know what others think. They might think of you as a jock, a suit-wearing conservative, a nature lover, and so on. Based on these impressions, your audience might expect a boring speech, a shallow speech, a sermon, and so on. However, your concern should still be serving your audience’s needs and interests, not debunking their opinions of you or managing your image. In order to help them be receptive, you address their interests directly, and make sure they get an interesting, ethical speech.

Situational Analysis

The next type of analysis is called the situational audience analysis because it focuses on characteristics related to the specific speaking situation. The situational audience analysis can be divided into two main questions:

  • How many people came to hear my speech and why are they here? What events, concerns, and needs motivated them to come? What is their interest level, and what else might be competing for their attention?
  • What is the physical environment of the speaking situation? What is the size of the audience, layout of the room, existence of a podium or a microphone, and availability of digital media for visual aids? Are there any distractions, such as traffic noise?

Audience Size

In a typical class, your audience is likely to consist of twenty to thirty listeners. This audience size gives you the latitude to be relatively informal within the bounds of good judgment. It isn’t too difficult to let each audience member feel as though you’re speaking to him or her. However, you would not become so informal that you allow your carefully prepared speech to lapse into shallow entertainment. With larger audiences, it’s more difficult to reach out to each listener, and your speech will tend to be more formal, staying more strictly within its careful outline. You will have to work harder to prepare visual and audio material that reaches the people sitting at the back of the room, including possibly using amplification.

There are many occasions for speeches. Awards ceremonies, conventions and conferences, holidays, and other celebrations are some examples. However, there are also less joyful reasons for a speech, such as funerals, disasters, and the delivery of bad news. As always, there are likely to be mixed reactions. For instance, award ceremonies are good for community and institutional morale, but we wouldn’t be surprised to find at least a little resentment from listeners who feel deserving but were overlooked. Likewise, for a speech announcing bad news, it is likely that at least a few listeners will be glad the bad news wasn’t even worse. If your speech is to deliver bad news, it’s important to be honest but also to avoid traumatizing your audience. For instance, if you are a condominium board member speaking to a residents’ meeting after the building was damaged by a hurricane, you will need to provide accurate data about the extent of the damage and the anticipated cost and time required for repairs. At the same time, it would be needlessly upsetting to launch into a graphic description of injuries suffered by people, animals, and property in neighboring areas not connected to your condomium complex.

Some of the most successful speeches benefit from situational analysis to identify audience concerns related to the occasion. For example, when the president of the United States gives the annual State of the Union address, the occasion calls for commenting on the condition of the nation and outlining the legislative agenda for the coming year. The speech could be a formality that would interest only “policy wonks,” or with the use of good situational audience analysis, it could be a popular event reinforcing the connection between the president and the American people. In January 2011, knowing that the United States’ economy was slowly recovering and that jobless rates were still very high, President Barack Obama and his staff knew that the focus of the speech had to be on jobs. Similarly, in January 2003, President George W. Bush’s State of the Union speech focused on the “war on terror” and his reasons for justifying the invasion of Iraq. If you look at the history of State of the Union Addresses, you’ll often find that the speeches are tailored to the political, social, and economic situations facing the United States at those times.

Voluntariness of Audience

A voluntary audience gathers because they want to hear the speech, attend the event, or participate in an event. A classroom audience, in contrast, is likely to be a captive audience. Captive audiences are required to be present or feel obligated to do so. Given the limited choices perceived, a captive audience might give only grudging attention. Even when there’s an element of choice, the likely consequences of nonattendance will keep audience members from leaving. The audience’s relative perception of choice increases the importance of holding their interest.

Whether or not the audience members chose to be present, you want them to be interested in what you have to say. Almost any audience will be interested in a topic that pertains directly to them. However, your audience might also be receptive to topics that are indirectly or potentially pertinent to their lives. This means that if you choose a topic such as advances in the treatment of spinal cord injury or advances in green technology, you should do your best to show how these topics are potentially relevant to their lives or careers.

However, there are some topics that appeal to audience curiosity even when it seems there’s little chance of direct pertinence. For instance, topics such as Blackbeard the pirate or ceremonial tattoos among the Maori might pique the interests of various audiences. Depending on the instructions you get from your instructor, you can consider building an interesting message about something outside the daily foci of our attention.

Physical Setting

The physical setting can make or break even the best speeches, so it is important to exercise as much control as you can over it. In your classroom, conditions might not be ideal, but at least the setting is familiar. Still, you know your classroom from the perspective of an audience member, not a speaker standing in the front—which is why you should seek out any opporutunity to rehearse your speech during a minute when the room is empty. If you will be giving your presentation somewhere else, it is a good idea to visit the venue ahead of time if at all possible and make note of any factors that will affect how you present your speech. In any case, be sure to arrive well in advance of your speaking time so that you will have time to check that the microphone works, to test out any visual aids, and to request any needed adjustments in lighting, room ventilation, or other factors to eliminate distractions and make your audience more comfortable.

Key Takeaways

  • Demographic audience analysis focuses on group memberships of audience members.
  • Another element of audience is psychographic information, which focuses on audience attitudes, beliefs, and values.
  • Situational analysis of the occasion, physical setting, and other factors are also critical to effective audience analysis.
  • List the voluntary (political party, campus organization, etc.) and involuntary (age, race, sex, etc.) groups to which you belong. After each group, write a sentence or phrase about how that group influences your experience as a student.
  • Visit http://www.claritas.com/MyBestSegments/Default.jsp and http://homes.point2.com and report on the demographic information found for several different towns or zip codes. How would this information be useful in preparing an audience analysis?
  • In a short paragraph, define the term “fairness.” Compare your definition with someone else’s definition. What factors do you think contributed to differences in definition?
  • With a partner, identify an instance when you observed a speaker give a poor speech due to failing to analyze the situation. What steps could the speaker have taken to more effectively analyze the situation?

Grice, G. L., & Skinner, J. F. (2009). Mastering public speaking: The handbook (7th ed.). Boston, MA: Pearson.

Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life. (2008, February). Summary of key findings. In U.S. religious landscape survey . Retrieved from http://religions.pewforum.org/reports#

Tannen, D. (1994, December 11). The talk of the sandbox: How Johnny and Suzy’s playground chatter prepares them for life at the office. The Washington Post . Retrieved from http://www9.georgetown.edu/faculty/tannend/sandbox.htm

Stand up, Speak out Copyright © 2016 by University of Minnesota is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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5.1: The Importance of Audience Analysis

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The Benefits of Understanding Your Audience

The more you know and understand about the background and needs of your audience, the better you can prepare your speech.

LEARNING OBJECTIVE

Explain why it is important to understand your audience prior to delivering a speech

KEY TAKEAWAYS

Knowing your audience —their general age, gender, education level, religion, language, culture, and group membership—is the single most important aspect of developing your speech.

  • Analyzing your audience will help you discover information that you can use to build common ground between you and the members of your audience.
  • A key characteristic in public speaking situations is the unequal distribution of speaking time between the speaker and the audience. This means that the speaker talks more and the audience listens, often without asking questions or responding with any feedback.
  • audience : One or more people within hearing range of some message; for example, a group of people listening to a performance or speech; the crowd attending a stage performance.
  • audience analysis : A study of the pertinent elements defining the makeup and characteristics of an  audience.
  • Audience-centered : Tailored to an audience. When preparing a message, the speaker analyzes the audience in order to adapt the content and language usage to the level of the listeners.

Benefits of Understanding Audiences

When you are speaking, you want listeners to understand and respond favorably to what you are saying. An audience is one or more people who come together to listen to the speaker. Audience members may be face to face with the speaker or they may be connected by communication technology such as computers or other media. The audience may be small and private or it may be large and public. A key characteristic of public speaking situations is the unequal distribution of speaking time between speaker and audience. As an example, the speaker usually talks more while the audience listens, often without asking questions or responding with any feedback. In some situations, the audience may ask questions or respond overtly by clapping or making comments.

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Audience-Centered Approach to Speaking

Since there is usually limited communication between the speaker and the audience, there is limited opportunity to go back to explain your meaning either during the speech or afterward. When planning a speech, it is important to know about the audience and to adapt the message to the audience. You want to prepare an audience-centered speech, a speech with a focus on the audience.

In public speaking, you are speaking to and for your audience; thus, understanding the audience is a major part of the speech-making process. In audience-centered speaking, getting to know your target audience is one of the most important tasks that you face. You want to learn about the major demographics of the audience, such as general age, gender, education, religion, and culture, as well as to what groups the audience members belong. Additionally, learning about the values, attitudes, and beliefs of the members of your audience will allow you to anticipate and plan your message.

Finding Common Ground by Taking Perspective

You want to analyze your audience prior to your speech so that during the speech you can create a link between you, the speaker, and the audience. You want to be able to figuratively step inside the minds of audience members to understand the world from their perspectives. Through this process, you can find common ground with your audience, which allows you to align your message with what the audience already knows or believes.

Gathering and Interpreting Information

Audience analysis involves gathering and interpreting information about the recipients of oral, written, or visual communication. There are very simple methods for conducting an audience analysis, such as interviewing a small group about its knowledge or attitudes or using more involved methods of analyzing demographic studies of relevant segments of the population. You may also find it useful to look at sociological studies of different age groups or cultural groups. You might also use a questionnaire or rating scale to collect data about the basic demographic information and opinions of your target audience. These examples do not form an all-inclusive list of methods to analyze your audience, but they can help you obtain a general understanding of how you can learn about your audience. After considering all the known factors, a profile of the intended audience can be created, allowing you to speak in a manner that is understood by the intended audience.

Practical Benefits for the Speaker

Understanding who makes up your target audience will allow you to carefully plan your message and adapt what you say to the level of understanding and background of the listeners. Two practical benefits of conducting an audience analysis are (1) to prevent you from saying the wrong thing, such as telling a joke which offends, and (2) to help you speak to your audience in a language they understand about things that interest them. Your speech will be more successful if you can create a message that informs and engages your audience.

What to Look For

Analyze the audience to find the mix of ages, genders, sexual orientations, educational levels, religions, cultures, ethnicities, and races.

Examine your audience based on demographics

  • A speaker should look at his or her own values, beliefs, attitudes, and biases that may influence his or her perception of others.
  • Guard against egocentrism. A speaker must not regard his or her own opinions or interests as being the most important or valid.
  • Look at others to understand their background, attitudes, and beliefs.
  • Focus on audience demographics such as age, gender, sexual orientation, education, religion, and other relevant population characteristics to analyze the audience.
  • The depth of the audience analysis depends of the size of the intended audience and the method of delivery.
  • egocentrism : Preoccupation with one’s own internal world; the belief that one’s own opinions or interests are the most important or valid.
  • demographics : The characteristics of population such as age, gender, sexual orientation, occupation, education; classification of the characteristics of the people.

Look Inward to Uncover Blinders

A public speaker should turn her mental magnifying glass inward to examine the values, beliefs, attitudes, and biases that may influence her perception of others. The speaker should use this mental picture to look at the audience and view the world from the audience’s perspective. By looking at the audience, the speaker understands their reality.

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When the speaker views the audience only through her mental perception, she is likely to engage in egocentrism. Egocentrism is characterized by the preoccupation with one’s own internal world. Egocentrics regard themselves and their own opinions or interests as being the most important or valid. Egocentric people are unable to fully understand or cope with other people’s opinions and a reality that is different from what they are ready to accept.

Understanding Audience Background, Attitudes, and Beliefs

Public speakers must look at who their audience is, their background, attitudes, and beliefs. The speaker should attempt to reach the most accurate and effective analysis of her audience within a reasonable amount of time. For example, speakers can assess the demographics of her audience. Demographics are detailed accounts of human population characteristics and usually rendered as statistical population segments.

For an analysis of audience demographics for a speech, focus on the same characteristics studied in sociology. Audiences and populations comprise groups of people represented by different age groups that:

  • Are of the same or mixed genders
  • Have experienced the same events
  • Have the same or different sexual orientation
  • Have different educational attainment
  • Participate in different religions
  • Represent different cultures, ethnicities, or races

Speakers assess the audience’s attitude – a positive or negative evaluation of people, objects, event, activities, or ideas – toward a specific topic or purpose. The attitudes of the audience may vary from extremely negative to extremely positive, or completely ambivalent. By examining the preexisting beliefs of the audience regarding the speech’s general topic or particular purpose, speakers have the ability to persuade the audience members to buy into the speaker’s argument. This can also help with speech preparation.

Tips for the Speaker

The depth of the audience analysis depends of the size of the intended audience and method of delivery. Speakers use different methods to become familiar with the background, attitudes, and beliefs of audiences in different environments and using various mediums (e.g., videoconferencing, phone, etc). For a small audience, the speaker can simply speak with them in a physical environment. However, the speaker is addressing a larger audience or speaking via teleconferencing or webcasting tools, it may be useful to collect data via surveys or questionnaires.

What to Do with Your Knowledge

Use knowledge about your audience to step into their minds, create an imaginary scenario, and test your ideas.

Identify with your audience by adopting their perspective

  • A successful speaker is able to step outside her own perceptual framework to understand the world as it is perceived by members of her audience.
  • The speaker engages in a process of first encoding his or her ideas from thoughts into words, then forming a message to be delivered to a group of listeners, or audience. The audience members attempt to decode what the speaker is saying so that they can understand it.
  • The better the speaker knows the members of the audience beforehand, the better the speaker can encode a message in a way that the audience can decode successfully.
  • One of the most useful strategies for adapting your topic and message to your audience is to use the process of identification to find common ground with them.
  • You can use your analysis to create a theoretical, imagined audience of individuals from the diverse backgrounds you have discovered in your audience analysis. Then you can decide whether or not the content will appeal to individuals within that audience.
  • encode : to turn one’s ideas into spoken language in order to transmit them to listeners
  • message : the verbal and nonverbal components of language, sent to the receiver by the sender, that convey an idea
  • Decode : to translate the sender’s spoken idea/message into something the receiver understands by using his or her knowledge of language based on personal experience

Identifying with the listeners

Step in to the minds of your listeners and see if you can identify with them. A successful speaker engages in perspective-taking. While preparing her speech, the speaker steps outside her own perceptual framework to understand the world as it is perceived by members of the audience. When the speaker takes an audience-centered approach to speech preparation, she focuses on the audience and how it will respond to what is being said. In essence, the speaker wants to mentally adopt the perspective of members of the audience in order to see the world as the audience members see it.

Encoding and Decoding

The speaker engages a process of encoding his or her ideas from thoughts into words, and of forming a message which is then delivered to an audience. The audience members then attempt to decode what the speaker is saying so that they can understand it. To better imagine this process, consider the example of encoding and decoding as it applies to the idea of a tree. I know that my audience is in New England and that they are familiar with oak trees. I use the word  tree  to encode my idea, and because my audience has experienced similar trees, they decode the word  tree  in the way that I intended. However, I may be thinking about a tree (a palm tree) that is in Hawaii, where I used to live, when I use the word  tree  to encode my idea. Unfortunately, when my audience decodes my word now, they are still thinking about the oak tree and will not see my palm tree. The audience no longer shares my perspective of the world or my experience with trees.

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Finding Common Ground

The more you find out about your audience, the more you can adapt your message to the interests, values, beliefs, and language level of the audience. Once you collect data about your audience, you are ready to summarize your findings and select the language and structure that is best suited to your particular audience. You are on a journey to find common ground in order to identify with your audience. One of the most useful strategies for adapting your topic and message to your audience is to use the process of identification. What do you and your audience have in common? And, conversely, how are you different? What ideas or examples in your speech can your audience identify with?

Creating a Theoretical, Imagined Audience

Create a theoretical, imagined situation to test your view of an audience for practice. You can use your analysis to create what is called a “theoretical, universal audience. ” The universal audience is an imagined audience that serves as a test for the speaker. Imagine in your mind a composite audience that contains individuals from the diverse backgrounds you have discovered in your audience analysis. Next, decide whether or not the content of your speech would appeal to individuals within that audience. What words or examples will the audience understand and what will they not understand? What terms about your subject will you need to define or explain for this audience? How different are the values and opinions you want your audience to accept from the present attitudes and beliefs they may hold?

In summary, use your knowledge of the audience to adapt your speech accordingly. Adopt the perspective of the audience in order to identify with them, and test out your ideas with an imagined audience composed of people with the background you have discovered through your research.

  • July 16, 2018
  • Communication skills

How To Analyse Your Audience For A Successful Presentation

Presentation checklist:

CONTENT – check

SLIDES – check

NOTES – check

PRACTICE – check

Presentations usually turn out to be events where we share what we know about the topic. The updates we think are important for the listeners. But whether it’s a toast at a wedding, an office presentation, a meeting or experience sharing at your alma mater – each event has a different kind of audience. And we speak for them , not ourselves. Some times, the audience will be a similar set of people – a team meeting or a diverse bunch – like a birthday party. Choosing your content that goes with the audience is the key to success. Here’s how:

Audience analysis is a key aspect of any speaking situation. The more audience oriented you are, the easier it’ll be for the audience to stay with you till the end. Here are a few ways to analyse your audience for a speech:

Presentation skills_Online module.047

Audience analysis is one of the key aspects of any speaking situation

Audience type : By this, I mean the a general category that you can put your audience into. A family group or a work group. Generally younger bunch or a mixed crowd.

Audience size : This makes a lot of difference in the way you prepare for the talk . A small intimate group will need very relevant and focussed content. You may not use the stage or microphone. You gestures will be a lot smaller. A big group demands dramatic gestures and more power in your voice. And content that appeals generally to everyone.

Audience knowledge:  What is the extent of the audience’s knowledge in the subject matter. If your talk is a project status update and it’s mostly your team, feel free to use jargons and acronyms. But if it’s for the stakeholders to apprise them of your work, slipping in a little exposition might be a good idea.

Audience expectations : You may bring in the best content for the audience. But does the audience want to hear it? No matter what you think about the content, the audience comes with its own expectations. For instance, a toast – no matter many hilarious stories you have about the birthday boy – is appreciated when it is short and sticks to the point. Any longer and you are just getting in the between the guests and the festivities.

Audience demographic : Is the audience primarily men? Or is the majority women? What is the age distribution like? Are there different nationalities involved? It might not be possible to analyse every set of audience in such great detail. But you’ll thank yourself for considering these parameters where the speaking situation calls for it. For instance, you could be called up on to address the latest batch at your alma mater in a different country. It’ll help to dissect the audience more carefully here.

Cross cultural context : This is important especially if you are going to talk to people from a different country/countries. From small talk to sense of humour, you’ll need to watch out for the right spot. Some cultures love small talk whereas others frown upon it. You don’t want to assume everyone else will appreciate being asked after their families like we do in our country.

Pathos

These 3 pillars of an impressive speech are a good benchmark to go by

There are different kinds of audience. But human nature is pretty much the same everywhere. And that’s why Aristotle , that wise old man from Greece, gave us three big pillars to base our formal speeches on. These can help you a great deal while you prepare for your presentation. You can be more of less sure that a talk based on these will be successful in most situations. Let’s look at what each means –

Ethos : is the credibility of a person as a speaker. It could by virtue of your standing in the community or the command over the subject. For instance, if you are a PhD holder in a subject related to the talk, the audience is more likely to take you as credible. Similarly, if you the project head, you are the person to talk about it. So you need to make sure that people look up to you as the right person to talk to them. You can do that right at the start – if people don’t know you well – by telling them your credentials and what makes you the right person to talk to them.

Logos : Logic is central to human understanding. Even if someone with authority goes up on the stage and proclaims that distributing free footwear to the poor will end world poverty – the logic doesn’t quite add up. And the audience will lose interest. Hence it is important to follow logic in your presentation.

Pathos: As you can see in the figure above, pathos is by far the most important. Pathos is appeal to emotions of the audience. Unless you create this connection, you’ll never grab the attention of the audience. This can be done by using similes, metaphors or stories. Pathos becomes all the more central when the speech involves getting people to take a course of action. Like donating for homeless kids or taking actions to save the planet.

The audience is the most important – yet often neglected – part of a presentation. Be sure to give them the respect due to them when they turn up to listen to you.

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How to Improve Your Speeches Through Audience Analysis

This begs the question — how do you capitalize  on your audience analysis? That is, how do you reap the benefits to offset the time that you invested?

In this article, we examine how to improve your presentation based on your audience analysis.

8 Ways to Use Audience Analysis to Improve Any Presentation

We start by examining eight actions you can take to improve just about any presentation:

  • What is Audience Analysis?
  • How to Conduct Audience Analysis
  • How to Use Audience Analysis
  • Audience Analysis Worksheet [PDF Download]
  • Dress like your audience, or maybe one notch above.
  • Choose a presentation format appropriate to your audience and the event.
  • Select the supporting points which will have greatest impact on this audience.
  • Use words which match your audience’s vocabulary.
  • Draw upon sources which your audience recognizes for statistics, quotations, examples, or other evidence.
  • Choose stories which will resonate with your audience.
  • Design visuals that impact your audience.
  • Customize your call-to-action for this audience.

1. Dress like your audience, or maybe one notch above.

This is usually an easy way to boost your ethos as your audience will like you more if you “fit in” with them. Dressing significantly better or significantly worse than your audience makes you appear like an outsider.

For other clothing tips, see How to Dress for Public Speaking .

2. Choose a presentation format appropriate to your audience and the event.

Sometimes slides are necessary; sometimes not. Sometimes you need a lengthy Q&A; sometimes not. Some audiences expect a traditional lecture style; some expect the opposite. Whatever you choose, you should be guided by the needs and expectations of your audience; don’t merely choose the format you are accustomed to delivering.

Note that this doesn’t mean you must always conform to audience expectations. In rare circumstances, you might deliberately shock the audience with a style that goes against what they expect. It’s risky, but in the right setting, it may pay off.

3. Select the supporting points which will have greatest impact on this audience.

While preparing, you will usually have a large number of potential supporting points, but you can’t present them all within your time constraints. When choosing which to keep and which to cut, consider those which this audience will find most persuasive.

Will this audience be persuaded more by a financial argument or an environmental one? Do they value simplicity more than convenience? Do they value security more than freedom?

4. Use words which match your audience’s vocabulary.

This applies both to your spoken words as well as words which appear on your visuals.

Don’t say “dollars” when you should be saying “euros.” Don’t use acronyms or technical jargon that your audience won’t understand. Similarly, don’t be sloppy with terms where your audience expects high precision. Do your homework!

5. Draw upon sources which your audience recognizes for statistics, quotations, examples, or other evidence.

To maximize the impact of quotations, examples, and other supporting material, draw from sources that your audience knows and (hopefully) respects.

For example, quote Bill Gates when speaking to entrepreneurs or CEOs. Quote Justin Bieber when talking to teen-aged girls.

6. Choose stories which will resonate with your audience.

Stories offer tremendous benefits in your presentations, but you’ll lose much of the impact if your audience doesn’t identify with the hero in some way.

For example, when speaking to community organizers, tell stories where a community organizer is the hero. When speaking to a school auditorium of parents, feature parenting heroes instead.

7. Design visuals that impact your audience.

If you want to trigger emotions, don’t necessarily select the images that you find most impressive; select those which impact your audience most.

If you are using charts or diagrams, choose those which will answer the questions your audience members have.

If your slides carry a theme throughout (e.g. Star Trek), make sure it is appropriate for your audience.

8. Customize your call-to-action for this audience.

To maximize the likelihood that your audience takes action, make sure your call-to-action is tailored for them given their strengths and resources.

Suppose you are speaking on behalf of Habitat for Humanity, an organization that provides affordable housing. If your audience is a group of wealthy CEOs, then the call-to-action might be asking for monetary donations or to get their employees engaged. If your audience is a group of service club members, however, your call-to-action might be to invite hands-on participation on a new home.

How to Handle Special Audiences

The guidelines above apply to just about every presentation, regardless of any particular audience characteristic.

Sometimes, though, your audience analysis will uncover a specific fact that will impact your choices. Consider the following special audiences:

  • Mandatory attendance Overall, it’s much easier speaking to people who choose to attend, because their attendance demonstrates their motivation. So, when speaking to an audience where participation is mandatory, you’ll need to convince them that there is value for them.
  • Hostile audience When your audience is predisposed to oppose your message, you’ll need to practice logical jujitsu to show them how their beliefs really do support your objectives. You are probably doomed if you fail to recognize this in your analysis.
  • Fatigued audience When you are speaking late in the afternoon (or evening), or even just before lunch after a tiring morning, it is tough to keep your audience’s attention. Keep it short. Keep it upbeat and high-energy.
  • Conference audience Whenever you are speaking at a larger event, do your homework on how your presentation fits with the material from other speakers. The more you can draw connections for the audience, the more valuable you’ll be.

What to do with a heterogeneous audience?

We’ve assumed so far that you have a homogeneous audience, with a single audience persona (i.e. everyone attending has similar background, knowledge level, key demographic characteristics, etc.). This keeps it simple, but is rarely realistic.

Often, your audience will be mixed in some critical aspect. For example:

  • You are presenting to potential customers. The audience is split between senior management (managers, accountants, legal) and the technical team. These groups have very different backgrounds, different issues of concern, and different vocabularies.
  • You are presenting at a civic government meeting on a controversial issue. The audience is comprised of people from the following groups: pro-business; environmentalists; pro-family; etc.
  • You are speaking at the parent-teacher association meeting for your child’s school. The audience includes parents, teachers, and school board members.

So, what do you do when your audience is a mix of two or more distinct sub-groups?

There are three basic strategies:

  • Speak to only one sub-group of the audience and ignore the others. This is a risky strategy, but may be appropriate if, for example, the decision rests with a single person or a small group of people. It may make sense to focus your presentation on the decision-maker(s).
  • Address each of your audience sub-groups with different parts of your presentation. Part of your presentation might be aimed at sub-group A, while the next part may address the concerns of sub-group B, and then sub-group C, and so on. This is a strategy employed often by politicians.
  • Ignore the differences between audience members, and instead focus on common appeals. Although important differences exist between the sub-groups, you might choose to ignore these differences to avoid getting tangled up in opposing arguments. Your presentation can “stay above the fray” and focus instead on values, principles, and issues where there is common ground.

Depending on your situation, any of these strategies may be optimal for you.

Next in this Series…

In the next article, we’ll share a useful worksheet that can help you turn audience analysis into a positive, focused speaking habit.

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Great advice Andrew. Especially the point about speaking to the audience on their level. We tend to get caught up in all the jargon when the audience could care less. They need to hear the message not how “smart” we are.

As a supplement to point #4 (about vocabulary), I’d say speakers need to be careful when reusing parts of talks that were previously presented to people in a different role.

For instance, suppose you previously presented slides to clients or prospects, and now you’re presenting some of the same slides to salespeople (say, to train them about a new product or your sales process). In that case, where the slides say things like “your business”, you’d need to reword them to say “your client’s business”.

You’d think that would go without saying, but all too often slides get hastily reused without being amended to suit the new audience, which disengages people. (For more on that, please see http://wp.me/p1PHR3-45#right_you )

Great article Andrew! Especially the advice about clear and concise CTA component which is often forgotten or poorly executed (and many presentations depend on that execution).

May I adapt your fantastic audience analysis worksheet (with attribution, of course) for inclusion in a public speaking course I am developing?

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As an instructional designer, you will find yourself standing at the podium making instructional or informational presentations and communicating with groups of people in meetings and conferences and various other formal settings. Honing your leadership and presentation skills are a must for any professional scenario you are placed in.  This section will discuss the importance of conducting an audience analysis and tailoring your presentation/speech to your audience while leveraging your leadership skills.

Learning Objectives

  • Describe the value of acknowledging your audience.
  • Explain the importance of choosing a worthwhile topic.
  • Explain how to adapt your speech to your audience’s needs.
  • Explain the value of speaking with credibility.
  • Describe how to gather and use demographic information.
  • Explain how to gather and use psychographic information.
  • Describe how to gather and use situational information.
  • List several tools for gathering audience information.
  • Create effective tools for gathering audience information
  • Explain how you can use your audience analysis when you prepare a speech.
  • Recognize how your audience analysis can help you alter your speech while speaking.

Why Conduct an Audience Analysis

Picture yourself in front of the audience, about to deliver your speech. This is the moment when your relationship with your audience begins, and the quality of this relationship will influence how receptive they will be to your ideas, or at least how willing they’ll be to listen to what you have to say. One of the best ways to initiate this relationship is by finding a way to acknowledge your audience. This can be as simple as establishing eye contact and thanking them for coming to hear your presentation. If they’ve braved bad weather, are missing a world-class sports event, or are putting up with an inconvenience such as a stuffy conference room, tell them how much you appreciate their presence in spite of the circumstances. This can go a long way toward getting them “on board” with your message.

Choosing a Worthwhile Topic

Your selection of a topic should reflect your regard for the audience. There is no universal list of good or bad topics, but you have an ethical responsibility to select a topic that will be worth listening to. As a student, you are probably sensitive to how unpleasant it would be to listen to a speech on a highly complex or technical topic that you found impossible to understand. However, have you considered that audiences do not want to waste their time or attention listening to a speech that is too simple? Many students find themselves tempted to choose an easy topic, or a topic they already know a great deal about. This is an understandable temptation; if you are like most students, you have many commitments and the demands on your time are considerable. Many experts encourage students to begin with something they already know. However, our experience tells us that students often do this simply to reduce their workload. For example, if the purpose of your speech is to inform or persuade students in your public speaking class, a topic such as fitness, drunk driving, the Greek system (campus fraternities and sororities), or credit card responsibility may be easy for you to address, but it is unlikely to go very far toward informing your audience, and in all likelihood, it will not be persuading them either. Instead, your audience members and your professor will quickly recognize that you were thinking of your own needs rather than those of your audience.

To avoid this trap, it behooves you to seek a topic that will be novel and interesting both for you and for your audience. It will also be important to do some credible research in order to ensure that even the most informed audience members will learn something from you. There are many topics that could provide a refreshing departure from your usual academic studies. Topics such as the Bermuda Triangle, biopiracy, the environmental niche of sharks, the green lifestyle, and the historic Oneida Community all provide interesting views of human and natural phenomena not usually provided in public education. Such topics might be more likely to hold the interest of your classroom audience than topics they’ve heard about time and time again.

You should be aware that your audience will not have the same set of knowledge that you do. For instance, if you are speaking about biopiracy, you should probably define it and give a clear example. If your speech is on the green lifestyle, it would be important to frame it as a realistic choice, not a goal so remote as to be hopeless. In each case, you should use audience analysis to consider how your audience will respond to you, your topic, and your message.

Nothing is more lamentable than a rhetorical actor who endeavors to make grandiose the impressions of others through the utilization of an elephantine albeit nonsensical argot—or nothing is worse than a speaker who tries to impress the audience with a giant vocabulary that no one understands. In the first portion of the preceding sentence, we pulled out as many polysyllabic words as we could find. Unfortunately, most people will just find the sentence wordy and the meaning will pass right over their heads. As such, we as public speakers must ensure that we are clear in what we say.

Make sure that you state your topic clearly at the outset, using words that your audience will understand. Letting them know what to expect from your speech shows consideration for them as listeners and lets them know that you value their time and attention.

Throughout your speech, define your terms clearly and carefully in order to avoid misleading or alarming people by mistake. Be careful not to use jargon or “insider” language that will exclude listeners who aren’t “in the know.” If you approach audience analysis in haste, you might find yourself presenting a speech with no clear message. You might avoid making any statements outright from fear of offending. It is much better to know to whom you’re speaking and to present a clear, decisive message that lets listeners know what you think.

Adapt Your Speech to Audience Needs

When preparing a speech for a classroom audience consisting of other students and your professor, you may feel that you know their interests and expectations fairly well. However, we learn public speaking in order to be able to address other audiences where we can do some good. In some cases, your audience might consist of young children who are not ready to accept the fact that a whale is not a fish or that the moon is always round even though it sometimes appears to be a crescent or a half circle. In other cases, your audience might include retirees living on fixed incomes and who therefore might not agree that raising local taxes is a vital “investment in the future.”

Even in an audience that appears to be homogeneous—composed of people who are very similar to one another—different listeners will understand the same ideas in different ways. Every member of every audience has his or her own frame of reference—the unique set of perspectives, experience, knowledge, and values belonging to every individual. An audience member who has been in a car accident caused by a drunk driver might not appreciate a lighthearted joke about barhopping. Similarly, stressing the importance of graduate school might be discouraging to audience members who don’t know whether they can even afford to stay in college to complete an undergraduate degree.

These examples illustrate why audience analysis—the process of learning all you reasonably can about your audience—is so centrally important. Audience analysis includes consideration of demographic information, such as the gender, age range, marital status, race, and ethnicity of the people in your audience. Another, perhaps less obvious, demographic factor is socioeconomic status, which refers to a combination of characteristics including income, wealth, level of education, and occupational prestige. Each of these dimensions gives you some information about which kinds of topics, and which aspects of various topics, will be well received.

Suppose you are preparing to give an informative speech about early childhood health care. If your audience is a group of couples who have each recently had a new baby and who live in an affluent suburb, you can expect that they will be young adults with high socioeconomic status; they will likely be eager to know about the very best available health care for their children, whether they are healthy or have various medical problems. In contrast, if your audience is a group of nurses, they may differ in age, but will be similar in education and occupational prestige. They will already know quite a lot about the topic, so you will want to find an aspect that may be new for them, such as community health care resources for families with limited financial resources or for referring children with special needs. As another example, if you are addressing a city council committee that is considering whether to fund a children’s health care initiative, your audience is likely to have very mixed demographics.

Audience analysis also takes into account what market researchers call psychographic information, which is more personal and more difficult to predict than demographics. Psychographic information involves the beliefs, attitudes, and values that your audience members embrace. Respecting your audience means that you avoid offending, excluding, or trivializing the beliefs and values they hold. Returning to the topic of early childhood health care, you can expect new parents to be passionate about wanting the best for their child. The psychographics of a group of nurses would revolve around their professional competence and the need to provide “standard of care” for their patients. In a city council committee meeting, the topic of early childhood health care may be a highly personal and emotional issue for some of your listeners, while for others it may be strictly a matter of dollars and cents.

Consider Audience Diversity

Diversity is a key dimension of audience membership and, therefore, of audience analysis. While the term “diversity” is often used to refer to racial and ethnic minorities, it is important to realize that audiences can be diverse in many other ways as well. Being mindful of diversity means being respectful of all people and striving to avoid racism, ethnocentrism, sexism, ageism, elitism, and other assumptions. An interesting “ism” that is not often mentioned is chronocentrism, or the assumption that people today are superior to people who lived in earlier eras (Russell, 1991).

Sociologists John R. Logan and Wenquan Zhang analyzed racial and ethnic diversity in US cities and observed a pattern that rewrites the traditional “rules” of neighborhood change (Logan & Zhang, 2010). Whereas in our grandparents’ day a racially mixed neighborhood was one with African American and white residents, in recent decades, many more people from a variety of Asian and Latin American countries have immigrated to the United States. As a result, many cities have neighborhoods that are richly diverse with Asian, Hispanic, and African American cultural influences as well as those of white European Americans. Each cultural group consists of people from many communities and occupations. Each cultural group came to the United States for different reasons and came from different communities and occupations within their original cultures. Even though it can be easy to assume that people from a culture are exactly like each other, we undermine our credibility when we create our message as though members of these cultures are carbon copies of each other.

One of the author’s classes included two students from China. During a discussion of cultural similarity and difference, one remarked, “I thought we would have the same tastes in food because we are both from China, but she likes different spices and cooking techniques than I do.”

While race, ethnicity, and culture may be relatively visible aspects of diversity, there are many other aspects that are less obvious, so your audience is often more diverse than you might initially think. Suppose you are going to give a talk on pool safety to residents of a very affluent suburban community—will all your audience members be wealthy? No. There might be some who are unemployed, some who are behind on their mortgage payments, some who live in rented rooms, not to mention some who work as babysitters or housekeepers. Furthermore, if your listeners have some characteristic in common, it doesn’t mean that they all think alike. For instance, if your audience consists of people who are members of military families, don’t assume that they all have identical beliefs about national security. If there are many business students in your audience, don’t assume they all agree about the relative importance of ethics and profits. Instead, recognize that a range of opinion exists.

This is where the frame of reference we mentioned earlier becomes an important concept. People have a wide variety of reasons for making the choices they make and for doing the things they do. For instance, a business student, while knowing that profitability is important, might have a strong interest in green lifestyles, low energy use, and alternative energy sources, areas of economic development that might require a great deal of investment before profits are realized. In fact, some business students may want to be involved in a paradigm shift away from “business as usual.”

These examples illustrate how important it is to use audience analysis to avoid stereotyping—taking for granted that people with a certain characteristic in common have the same likes, dislikes, values, and beliefs. All members of our audiences deserve to have the same sensitivity and the same respect extended to them as unique individuals. Respecting diversity is not merely a responsibility within public speaking; it should be a responsibility we strive to embrace in all our human interactions.

Avoid Offending Your Audience

It might seem obvious that speakers should use audience analysis to avoid making offensive remarks, but even very experienced speakers sometimes forget this basic rule. If you were an Anglo-American elected official addressing a Latino audience, would you make a joke about a Mexican American person’s name sounding similar to the name of a popular brand of tequila? In fact, a state governor did just that in June 2011. Not suprisingly, news organizations covering the event reported that the joke fell flat (Shahid, 2011). People are members of groups they didn’t choose and can’t change. We didn’t choose our race, ethnicity, sex, age, sexual orientation, intellectual potential, or appearance. We already know that jokes aimed at people because of their membership in these groups are not just politically incorrect but also ethically wrong.

It is not only insensitive humor that can offend an audience. Speakers also need to be aware of language and nonverbal behaviors that state or imply a negative message about people based on their various membership groups. Examples include language that suggests that all scientists are men, that all relationships are heterosexual, or that all ethnic minorities are unpatriotic. By the same token, we should avoid embedding assumptions about people in our messages. Even the most subtle suggestion may not go unnoticed. For example, if, in your speech, you assume that elderly people are frail and expensively medicated, you may offend people whose elder loved ones do not conform in any way to your assumptions.

Scholars Samovar and McDaniel tell us that ethical language choices require four guidelines:

  • Be accurate; present the facts accurately.
  • Be aware of the emotional impact; make sure that you don’t manipulate feelings.
  • Avoid hateful words; refrain from language that disparages or belittles people.
  • Be sensitive to the audience; know how audience members prefer to be identified (e.g., Native American instead of Indian, women instead of girls, African American instead of black, disabled instead of crippled) (Samovar & McDaniel, 2007).

If you alienate your audience, they will stop listening. They will refuse to accept your message, no matter how true or important it is. They might even become hostile. If you fail to recognize the complexity of your audience members and if you treat them as stereotypes, they will resent your assumptions and doubt your credibility.

Ethical Speaking is Sincere Speaking

Ethos is the term Aristotle used to refer to what we now call credibility: the perception that the speaker is honest, knowledgeable, and rightly motivated. Your ethos, or credibility, must be established as you build rapport with your listeners. Have you put forth the effort to learn who they are and what you can offer to them in your speech? Do you respect them as individual human beings? Do you respect them enough to serve their needs and interests? Is your topic relevant and appropriate for them? Is your approach honest and sensitive to their preexisting beliefs? Your ability to answer these questions in a constructive way must be based on the best demographic and psychographic information you can use to learn about your listeners.

The audience needs to know they can trust the speaker’s motivations, intentions, and knowledge. They must believe that the speaker has no hidden motives, will not manipulate or trick them, and has their best interests at heart.

In order to convey regard and respect for the audience, you must be sincere. You must examine the motives behind your topic choice, the true purpose of your speech, and your willingness to do the work of making sure the content of the speech is true and represents reality. This can be difficult for students who face time constraints and multiple demands on their efforts. However, the attitude you assume for this task represents, in part, the kind of professional, citizen, parent, and human being you want to be. Even if you’ve given this issue little thought up to now, you can examine your motives and the integrity of your research and message construction. Ethically, you should.

Types of Audience Analysis

While audience analysis does not guarantee against errors in judgment, it will help you make good choices in topic, language, style of presentation, and other aspects of your speech. The more you know about your audience, the better you can serve their interests and needs. There are certainly limits to what we can learn through information collection, and we need to acknowledge that before making assumptions, but knowing how to gather and use information through audience analysis is an essential skill for successful speakers.

Demographic Analysis

As indicated earlier, demographic information includes factors such as gender, age range, marital status, race and ethnicity, and socioeconomic status. In your public speaking class, you probably already know how many students are male and female, their approximate ages, and so forth. But how can you assess the demographics of an audience ahead of time if you have had no previous contact with them? In many cases, you can ask the person or organization that has invited you to speak; it’s likely that they can tell you a lot about the demographics of the people who are expected to come to hear you.

Whatever method you use to gather demographics, exercise respect from the outset. For instance, if you are collecting information about whether audience members have ever been divorced, be aware that not everyone will want to answer your questions. You can’t require them to do so, and you may not make assumptions about their reluctance to discuss the topic. You must allow them their privacy.

There are certain things you can learn about an audience based on age. For instance, if your audience members are first-year college students, you can assume that they have grown up in the post-9/11 era and have limited memory of what life was like before the “war on terror.” If your audience includes people in their forties and fifties, it is likely they remember a time when people feared they would contract the AIDS virus from shaking hands or using a public restroom. People who are in their sixties today came of age during the 1960s, the era of the Vietnam War and a time of social confrontation and experimentation. They also have frames of reference that contribute to the way they think, but it may not be easy to predict which side of the issues they support

Gender can define human experience. Clearly, most women have had a different cultural experience from that of men within the same culture. Some women have found themselves excluded from certain careers. Some men have found themselves blamed for the limitations imposed on women. In books such as You Just Don’t Understand and Talking from 9 to 5, linguist Deborah Tannen has written extensively on differences between men’s and women’s communication styles. Tannen explains, “This is not to say that all women and all men, or all boys and girls, behave any one way. Many factors influence our styles, including regional and ethnic backgrounds, family experience and individual personality. But gender is a key factor, and understanding its influence can help clarify what happens when we talk” (Tannen, 1994).

Marriage tends to impose additional roles on both men and women and divorce even more so, especially if there are children. Even if your audience consists of young adults who have not yet made occupational or marital commitments, they are still aware that gender and the choices they make about issues such as careers and relationships will influence their experience as adults.

In past generations, Americans often used the metaphor of a “melting pot” to symbolize the assimilation of immigrants from various countries and cultures into a unified, harmonious “American people.” Today, we are aware of the limitations in that metaphor, and have largely replaced it with a multiculturalist view that describes the American fabric as a “patchwork” or a “mosaic.” We know that people who immigrate do not abandon their cultures of origin in order to conform to a standard American identity. In fact, cultural continuity is now viewed as a healthy source of identity.

We also know that subcultures and cocultures exist within and alongside larger cultural groups. For example, while we are aware that Native American people do not all embrace the same values, beliefs, and customs as mainstream white Americans, we also know that members of the Navajo nation have different values, beliefs, and customs from those of members of the Sioux or the Seneca. We know that African American people in urban centers like Detroit and Boston do not share the same cultural experiences as those living in rural Mississippi. Similarly, white Americans in San Francisco may be culturally rooted in the narrative of distant ancestors from Scotland, Italy, or Sweden or in the experience of having emigrated much more recently from Australia, Croatia, or Poland.

Not all cultural membership is visibly obvious. For example, people in German American and Italian American families have widely different sets of values and practices, yet others may not be able to differentiate members of these groups. Differences are what make each group interesting and are important sources of knowledge, perspectives, and creativity.

There is wide variability in religion as well. The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life found in a nationwide survey that 84 percent of Americans identify with at least one of a dozen major religions, including Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism, Islam, Hinduism, and others. Within Christianity alone, there are half a dozen categories including Roman Catholic, Mormon, Jehovah’s Witness, Orthodox (Greek and Russian), and a variety of Protestant denominations. Another 6 percent said they were unaffiliated but religious, meaning that only one American in ten is atheist, agnostic, or “nothing in particular” (Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, 2008).

Even within a given denomination, a great deal of diversity can be found. For instance, among Roman Catholics alone, there are people who are devoutly religious, people who self-identify as Catholic but do not attend mass or engage in other religious practices, and others who faithfully make confession and attend mass but who openly question Papal doctrine on various issues. Catholicism among immigrants from the Caribbean and Brazil is often blended with indigenous religion or with religion imported from the west coast of Africa. It is very different from Catholicism in the Vatican.

The dimensions of diversity in the religion demographic are almost endless, and they are not limited by denomination. Imagine conducting an audience analysis of people belonging to an individual congregation rather than a denomination: even there, you will most likely find a multitude of variations that involve how one was brought up, adoption of a faith system as an adult, how strictly one observes religious practices, and so on.

Yet, even with these multiple facets, religion is still a meaningful demographic lens. It can be an indicator of probable patterns in family relationships, family size, and moral attitudes.

Group Membership

In your classroom audience alone, there will be students from a variety of academic majors. Every major has its own set of values, goals, principles, and codes of ethics. A political science student preparing for law school might seem to have little in common with a student of music therapy, for instance. In addition, there are other group memberships that influence how audience members understand the world. Fraternities and sororities, sports teams, campus organizations, political parties, volunteerism, and cultural communities all provide people with ways of understanding the world as it is and as we think it should be.

Because public speaking audiences are very often members of one group or another, group membership is a useful and often easy to access facet of audience analysis. The more you know about the associations of your audience members, the better prepared you will be to tailor your speech to their interests, expectations, and needs.

Education is expensive, and people pursue education for many reasons. Some people seek to become educated, while others seek to earn professional credentials. Both are important motivations. If you know the education levels attained by members of your audience, you might not know their motivations, but you will know to what extent they could somehow afford the money for an education, afford the time to get an education, and survive educational demands successfully.

The kind of education is also important. For instance, an airplane mechanic undergoes a very different kind of education and training from that of an accountant or a software engineer. This means that not only the attained level of education but also the particular field is important in your understanding of your audience.

People choose occupations for reasons of motivation and interest, but their occupations also influence their perceptions and their interests. There are many misconceptions about most occupations. For instance, many people believe that teachers work an eight-hour day and have summers off. When you ask teachers, however, you might be surprised to find out that they take work home with them for evenings and weekends, and during the summer, they may teach summer school as well as taking courses in order to keep up with new developments in their fields. But even if you don’t know those things, you would still know that teachers have had rigorous generalized and specialized qualifying education, that they have a complex set of responsibilities in the classroom and the institution, and that, to some extent, they have chosen a relatively low-paying occupation over such fields as law, advertising, media, fine and performing arts, or medicine. If your audience includes doctors and nurses, you know that you are speaking to people with differing but important philosophies of health and illness. Learning about those occupational realities is important in avoiding wrong assumptions and stereotypes. We insist that you not assume that nurses are merely doctors “lite.” Their skills, concerns, and responsibilities are almost entirely different, and both are crucially necessary to effective health care.

Psychographic Analysis

Earlier, we mentioned psychographic information, which includes such things as values, opinions, attitudes, and beliefs. Authors Grice and Skinner present a model in which values are the basis for beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors (Grice & Skinner, 2009). Values are the foundation of their pyramid model. They say, “A value expresses a judgment of what is desirable and undesirable, right and wrong, or good and evil. Values are usually stated in the form of a word or phrase. For example, most of us probably share the values of equality, freedom, honesty, fairness, justice, good health, and family. These values compose the principles or standards we use to judge and develop our beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors.”

It is important to recognize that, while demographic information is fairly straightforward and verifiable, psychographic information is much less clear-cut. Two different people who both say they believe in equal educational opportunity may have very different interpretations of what “equal opportunity” means. People who say they don’t buy junk food may have very different standards for what specific kinds of foods are considered “junk food.”

We also acknowledge that people inherit some values from their family upbringing, cultural influences, and life experiences. The extent to which someone values family loyalty and obedience to parents, thrift, humility, and work may be determined by these influences more than by individual choice.

Psychographic analysis can reveal preexisting notions that limit your audience’s frame of reference. By knowing about such notions ahead of time, you can address them in your speech. Audiences are likely to have two basic kinds of preexisting notions: those about the topic and those about the speaker.

Preexisting Notions about Your Topic

Many things are a great deal more complex than we realize. Media stereotypes often contribute to our oversimplifications. For instance, one of your authors, teaching public speaking in the past decade, was surprised to hear a student claim that “the hippies meant well, but they did it wrong.” Aside from the question of the “it” that was done wrong, there was a question about how little the student actually knew about the diverse hippy cultures and their aspirations. The student seemed unaware that some of “the hippies” were the forebears of such things as organic bakeries, natural food co-ops, urban gardens, recycling, alternative energy, wellness, and other arguably positive developments.

It’s important to know your audience in order to make a rational judgment about how their views of your topic might be shaped. In speaking to an audience that might have differing definitions, you should take care to define your terms in a clear, honest way.

At the opposite end from oversimplification is the level of sophistication your audience might embody. Your audience analysis should include factors that reveal it. Suppose you are speaking about trends in civil rights in the United States. You cannot pretend that advancement of civil rights is virtually complete nor can you claim that no progress has been made. It is likely that in a college classroom, the audience will know that although much progress has been made, there are still pockets of prejudice, discrimination, and violence. When you speak to an audience that is cognitively complex, your strategy must be different from one you would use for an audience that is less educated in the topic. With a cognitively complex audience, you must acknowledge the overall complexity while stating that your focus will be on only one dimension. With an audience that’s uninformed about your topic, that strategy in a persuasive speech could confuse them; they might well prefer a black-and-white message with no gray areas. You must decide whether it is ethical to represent your topic this way.

When you prepare to do your audience analysis, include questions that reveal how much your audience already knows about your topic. Try to ascertain the existence of stereotyped, oversimplified, or prejudiced attitudes about it. This could make a difference in your choice of topic or in your approach to the audience and topic.

Preexisting Notions about You

People form opinions readily. For instance, we know that students form impressions of teachers the moment they walk into our classrooms on the first day. You get an immediate impression of our age, competence, and attitude simply from our appearance and nonverbal behavior. In addition, many have heard other students say what they think of us.

The same is almost certainly true of you. But it’s not always easy to get others to be honest about their impressions of you. They’re likely to tell you what they think you want to hear. Sometimes, however, you do know what others think. They might think of you as a jock, a suit-wearing conservative, a nature lover, and so on. Based on these impressions, your audience might expect a boring speech, a shallow speech, a sermon, and so on. However, your concern should still be serving your audience’s needs and interests, not debunking their opinions of you or managing your image. In order to help them be receptive, you address their interests directly, and make sure they get an interesting, ethical speech.

Situational Analysis

The next type of analysis is called the situational audience analysis because it focuses on characteristics related to the specific speaking situation. The situational audience analysis can be divided into two main questions:

  • How many people came to hear my speech and why are they here? What events, concerns, and needs motivated them to come? What is their interest level, and what else might be competing for their attention?
  • What is the physical environment of the speaking situation? What is the size of the audience, layout of the room, existence of a podium or a microphone, and availability of digital media for visual aids? Are there any distractions, such as traffic noise?

Audience Size

In a typical class, your audience is likely to consist of twenty to thirty listeners. This audience size gives you the latitude to be relatively informal within the bounds of good judgment. It isn’t too difficult to let each audience member feel as though you’re speaking to him or her. However, you would not become so informal that you allow your carefully prepared speech to lapse into shallow entertainment. With larger audiences, it’s more difficult to reach out to each listener, and your speech will tend to be more formal, staying more strictly within its careful outline. You will have to work harder to prepare visual and audio material that reaches the people sitting at the back of the room, including possibly using amplification.

There are many occasions for speeches. Awards ceremonies, conventions and conferences, holidays, and other celebrations are some examples. However, there are also less joyful reasons for a speech, such as funerals, disasters, and the delivery of bad news. As always, there are likely to be mixed reactions. For instance, award ceremonies are good for community and institutional morale, but we wouldn’t be surprised to find at least a little resentment from listeners who feel deserving but were overlooked. Likewise, for a speech announcing bad news, it is likely that at least a few listeners will be glad the bad news wasn’t even worse. If your speech is to deliver bad news, it’s important to be honest but also to avoid traumatizing your audience. For instance, if you are a condominium board member speaking to a residents’ meeting after the building was damaged by a hurricane, you will need to provide accurate data about the extent of the damage and the anticipated cost and time required for repairs. At the same time, it would be needlessly upsetting to launch into a graphic description of injuries suffered by people, animals, and property in neighboring areas not connected to your condomium complex.

Some of the most successful speeches benefit from situational analysis to identify audience concerns related to the occasion. For example, when the president of the United States gives the annual State of the Union address, the occasion calls for commenting on the condition of the nation and outlining the legislative agenda for the coming year. The speech could be a formality that would interest only “policy wonks,” or with the use of good situational audience analysis, it could be a popular event reinforcing the connection between the president and the American people. In January 2011, knowing that the United States’ economy was slowly recovering and that jobless rates were still very high, President Barack Obama and his staff knew that the focus of the speech had to be on jobs. Similarly, in January 2003, President George W. Bush’s State of the Union speech focused on the “war on terror” and his reasons for justifying the invasion of Iraq. If you look at the history of State of the Union Addresses, you’ll often find that the speeches are tailored to the political, social, and economic situations facing the United States at those times.

Voluntary Audience

A voluntary audience gathers because they want to hear the speech, attend the event, or participate in an event. A classroom audience, in contrast, is likely to be a captive audience. Captive audiences are required to be present or feel obligated to do so. Given the limited choices perceived, a captive audience might give only grudging attention. Even when there’s an element of choice, the likely consequences of nonattendance will keep audience members from leaving. The audience’s relative perception of choice increases the importance of holding their interest.

Whether or not the audience members chose to be present, you want them to be interested in what you have to say. Almost any audience will be interested in a topic that pertains directly to them. However, your audience might also be receptive to topics that are indirectly or potentially pertinent to their lives. This means that if you choose a topic such as advances in the treatment of spinal cord injury or advances in green technology, you should do your best to show how these topics are potentially relevant to their lives or careers.

However, there are some topics that appeal to audience curiosity even when it seems there’s little chance of direct pertinence. For instance, topics such as Blackbeard the pirate or ceremonial tattoos among the Maori might pique the interests of various audiences. Depending on the instructions you get from your instructor, you can consider building an interesting message about something outside the daily foci of our attention.

Physical Setting

The physical setting can make or break even the best speeches, so it is important to exercise as much control as you can over it. In your classroom, conditions might not be ideal, but at least the setting is familiar. Still, you know your classroom from the perspective of an audience member, not a speaker standing in the front—which is why you should seek out any opportunity to rehearse your speech during a minute when the room is empty. If you will be giving your presentation somewhere else, it is a good idea to visit the venue ahead of time if at all possible and make note of any factors that will affect how you present your speech. In any case, be sure to arrive well in advance of your speaking time so that you will have time to check that the microphone works, to test out any visual aids, and to request any needed adjustments in lighting, room ventilation, or other factors to eliminate distractions and make your audience more comfortable.

Conducting an Audience Analysis

Now that we have described what audience analysis is and why it is important, let’s examine some details of how to conduct it. Exactly how can you learn about the people who will make up your audience?

Direct Observation

One way to learn about people is to observe them. By observing nonverbal patterns of behavior, you can learn a great deal as long as you are careful how you interpret the behaviors. For instance, do people greet each other with a handshake, a hug, a smile, or a nod? Do members of opposite sexes make physical contact? Does the setting suggest more conservative behavior? By listening in on conversations, you can find out the issues that concern people. Are people in the campus center talking about political unrest in the Middle East? About concerns over future Pell Grant funding? We suggest that you consider the ethical dimensions of eavesdropping, however. Are you simply overhearing an open conversation, or are you prying into a highly personal or private discussion?

Interviews and Surveys

Because your demographic analysis will be limited to your most likely audience, your most accurate way to learn about them is to seek personal information through interviews and surveys. An interview is a one-on-one exchange in which you ask questions of a respondent, whereas a survey is a set of questions administered to several—or, preferably, many—respondents. Interviews may be conducted face-to-face, by phone, or by written means, such as texting. They allow more in-depth discussion than surveys, and they are also more time consuming to conduct. Surveys are also sometimes conducted face-to-face or by phone, but online surveys are increasingly common. You may collect and tabulate survey results manually, or set up an automated online survey through the free or subscription portals of sites like Survey Monkey and Zoomerang. Using an online survey provides the advantage of keeping responses anonymous, which may increase your audience members’ willingness to participate and to answer personal questions. Surveys are an efficient way to collect information quickly; however, in contrast to interviews, they don’t allow for follow-up questions to help you understand why your respondent gave a certain answer.

When you use interviews and surveys, there are several important things to keep in mind:

  • Make sure your interview and survey questions are directly related to your speech topic. Do not use interviews to delve into private areas of people’s lives. For instance, if your speech is about the debate between creationism and evolution, limit your questions to their opinions about that topic; do not meander into their beliefs about sexual behavior or their personal religious practices.
  • Create and use a standard set of questions. If you “ad lib” your questions so that they are phrased differently for different interviewees, you will be comparing “apples and oranges” when you compare the responses you’ve obtained.
  • Keep interviews and surveys short, or you could alienate your audience long before your speech is even outlined. Tell them the purpose of the interview or survey and make sure they understand that their participation is voluntary.
  • Don’t rely on just a few respondents to inform you about your entire audience. In all likelihood, you have a cognitively diverse audience. In order to accurately identify trends, you will likely need to interview or survey at least ten to twenty people.

In addition, when you conduct interviews and surveys, keep in mind that people are sometimes less than honest in describing their beliefs, attitudes, and behavior. This widely recognized weakness of interviews and survey research is known as socially desirable responding: the tendency to give responses that are considered socially acceptable. Marketing professor Ashok Lalwani divides socially desirable responding into two types: (1) impression management, or intentionally portraying oneself in a favorable light and (2) self-deceptive enhancement, or exaggerating one’s good qualities, often unconsciously (Lalwani, 2009).

You can reduce the effects of socially desirable responding by choosing your questions carefully. As marketing consultant Terry Vavra advises, “one should never ask what one can’t logically expect respondents to honestly reveal” (Vavra, 2009). For example, if you want to know audience members’ attitudes about body piercing, you are likely to get more honest answers by asking “Do you think body piercing is attractive?” rather than “How many piercings do you have and where on your body are they located?”

Focus Groups

A focus group is a small group of people who give you feedback about their perceptions. As with interviews and surveys, in a focus group you should use a limited list of carefully prepared questions designed to get at the information you need to understand their beliefs, attitudes, and values specifically related to your topic.

If you conduct a focus group, part of your task will be striking a balance between allowing the discussion to flow freely according to what group members have to say and keeping the group focused on the questions. It’s also your job to guide the group in maintaining responsible and respectful behavior toward each other.

In evaluating focus group feedback, do your best to be receptive to what people had to say, whether or not it conforms to what you expected. Your purpose in conducting the group was to understand group members’ beliefs, attitudes, and values about your topic, not to confirm your assumptions.

Using Existing Data about Your Audience

Occasionally, existing information will be available about your audience. For instance, if you have a student audience, it might not be difficult to find out what their academic majors are. You might also be able to find out their degree of investment in their educations; for instance, you could reasonably assume that the seniors in the audience have been successful students who have invested at least three years pursuing a higher education. Sophomores have at least survived their first year but may not have matched the seniors in demonstrating strong values toward education and the work ethic necessary to earn a degree.

In another kind of an audience, you might be able to learn other significant facts. For instance, are they veterans? Are they retired teachers? Are they members of a voluntary civic organization such as the Lions Club or Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD)? This kind of information should help you respond to their concerns and interests.

In other cases, you may be able to use demographics collected by public and private organizations. Demographic analysis is done by the US Census Bureau through the American Community Survey, which is conducted every year, and through other specialized demographic surveys (Bureau of the Census, 2011; Bureau of the Census, 2011). The Census Bureau analysis generally captures information about people in all the regions of the United States, but you can drill down in census data to see results by state, by age group, by gender, by race, and by other factors.

Demographic information about narrower segments of the United States, down to the level of individual zip codes, is available through private organizations such as The Nielsen Company (http://www.claritas.com/MyBestSegments/Default.jsp?ID=20&SubID=&pageName=ZIP%2BCode%2BLook-up), Sperling’s Best Places (http://www.bestplaces.net), and Point2Homes (http://homes.point2.com). Sales and marketing professionals use this data, and you may find it useful for your audience analysis as well.

Using Your Audience Analysis

A good audience analysis takes time, thought, preparation, implementation, and processing. If done well, it will yield information that will help you interact effectively with your audience. Professional speakers, corporate executives, sales associates, and entertainers all rely on audience analysis to connect with their listeners. So do political candidates, whose chances of gaining votes depend on crafting the message and mood to appeal to each specific audience. One audience might be preoccupied with jobs, another with property taxes, and another with crime. Similarly, your audience analysis should help you identify the interests of your audience. Ultimately, a successful audience analysis can guide you in preparing the basic content of your speech and help you adjust your speech “on the fly.”

Prepare Content with Your Audience in Mind

The first thing a good audience analysis can do is help you focus your content for your specific audience. If you are planning on a delivering a persuasive speech on why people should become vegans and you find out through analysis that half of your audience are daughters and sons of cattle ranchers, you need to carefully think through your approach to the content. Maybe you’ll need to tweak your topic to focus on just the benefits of veganism without trying to persuade the audience explicitly. The last thing you want to do as a speaker is stand before an audience who is highly negative toward your topic before you ever open your mouth. While there will always be some naysayers in any audience, if you think through your topic with your audience in mind, you may be able to find a topic that will be both interesting to you as a speaker and beneficial to your audience as well.

In addition to adjusting the topic of your speech prior to the speaking event, you can also use your audience analysis to help ensure that the content of your speech will be as clear and understandable as humanly possible. We can use our audience analysis to help sure that we are clear.

One area of clarity to be careful of is the use of idioms your audience may not know. An idiom is a word or phrase where the meaning cannot be predicted from normal, dictionary definitions. Many idioms are culturally or temporally based. For example, the phrase “according to Hoyle” indicates that something is done “by the book” or “by the rules,” as in “These measurements aren’t according to Hoyle, but they’re close enough to give a general idea.” Most of us have no clue who Hoyle was or what this idiom means. It refers to Edmond Hoyle, who wrote some of the most popular card-playing rule books back in the 1700s in England. Today, card game enthusiasts may understand the intent of “according to Hoyle,” but for most people it no longer carries specific meaning. When thinking about your speech, be careful not to accidentally use idioms that you find commonplace but your audience may not.

Adjusting Your Speech Based on Your Analysis

In addition to using audience analysis to help formulate speech content, we can also use our audience analysis to make adjustments during the actual speech. These adjustments can pertain to the audience and to the physical setting.

The feedback you receive from your audience during your speech is a valuable indication of ways to adjust your presentation. If you’re speaking after lunch and notice audience members looking drowsy, you can make adjustments to liven up the tone of your speech. You could use humor. You could raise your voice slightly. You could pose some questions and ask for a show of hands to get your listeners actively involved. As another example, you may notice from frowns and headshaking that some listeners aren’t convinced by the arguments you are presenting. In this case, you could spend more time on a specific area of your speech and provide more evidence than you originally intended. Good speakers can learn a lot by watching their audience while speaking and then make specific adjustments to both the content and delivery of the speech to enhance the speech’s ultimate impact.

The second kind of adjustment has to do with the physical setting for your speech. For example, your situational analysis may reveal that you’ll be speaking in a large auditorium when you had expected a nice, cozy conference room. If you’ve created visual aids for a small, intimate environment, you may have to omit it, or tell your listeners that they can view it after the presentation. You may also need to account for a microphone. If you’re lucky enough to have a cordless microphone, then you won’t have to make too many adjustments to your speaking style. If, on the other hand, the microphone is corded or is attached to an unmovable podium, you’ll have to make adjustments to how you deliver the presentation.

In preparing a speech about wealth distribution in the United States, one of our students had the opposite problem. Anticipating a large room, she had planned to use a one-hundred-foot tape measure to illustrate the percentage of the nation’s wealth owned by the top one-fifth of the population. However, when she arrived she found that the room was only twelve by twenty feet, so that she had to walk back and forth zigzagging the tape from end to end to stretch out one hundred feet. Had she thought more creatively about how to adapt to the physical setting, she could have changed her plans to use just ten feet of the tape measure to symbolize 100 percent of the wealth.

  • Ethos is the term Aristotle used to refer to what we now call credibility: the perception that the speaker is honest, knowledgeable, and rightly motivated.
  • Demographic information includes factors such as gender, age range, marital status, race and ethnicity, and socioeconomic status.
  • Psychographic information, which includes such things as values, opinions, attitudes, and beliefs.
  • Situational Audience Analys is because it focuses on characteristics related to the specific speaking situation.
  • Voluntary Audiences gather because they want to hear the speech, attend the event, or participate in an event.
  • Captive Audiences are required to be present or feel obligated to do so.

Key Takeaways

  • Audience analysis should be conducted so you can acknowledge your audience and their beliefs, knowledge, and attitudes.
  • Audience analysis should guide your choice of a topic so that you select a topic that is relevant and useful to them. Controversial topics can be excellent topics, but be sure to consider your audience when selecting your topic and deciding how to approach it.
  • Audience analysis requires that you adapt to the needs of your audience; this includes considering cultural diversity, making your message clear, avoiding offensive remarks, and speaking with sincerity.
  • While the term “diversity” is often used to refer to racial and ethnic minorities, it is important to realize that audiences can be diverse in many other ways as well. Being mindful of diversity means being respectful of all people and striving to avoid racism, ethnocentrism, sexism, ageism, elitism, and other assumptions.
  • Demographic audience analysis focuses on group memberships of audience members. Another element of audience is psychographic information, which focuses on audience attitudes, beliefs, and values.
  • Situational analysis of the occasion, physical setting, and other factors are also critical to effective audience analysis.
  • Several options exist for learning about your audience, including direct observation, interviews, surveys, focus groups, and using existing research about your audience.
  • In order to create effective tools for audience analysis, interview and survey questions must be clear and to the point, focus groups must be facilitated carefully, and you must be aware of multiple interpretations of direct observations or existing research about your audience.
  • You can use your audience analysis to provide you further information about what types of content would be appropriate and meaningful for your specific audience.
  • You can use your audience analysis to help you make adjustments to your speech in terms of both how you present the speech within a given environment and also how you adapt your content and delivery based on audience feedback during the speech.
  • Brainstorm a list of topics for an informative or persuasive speech. By yourself or with a partner, identify the kinds of information you need about your audience in order to make ethical decisions about how you approach the speech.
  • Make a list of values or opinions you have that might not conform to popular views. Why might these be important for a speaker to know before attempting to inform or persuade you?
  • Pretend you have been asked to give a speech about environmental conservation in the United States. What audience beliefs, attitudes, values, concerns, and other variables should you consider?
  • With a partner, identify an instance when you observed a speaker give a poor speech due to failing to analyze the situation. What steps could the speaker have taken to more effectively analyze the situation?
  • Create a seven-question set designed to discover your audience’s attitudes about your speech topic. Have a partner evaluate your questions for clarity, respect for audience privacy, and relevance to your topic.
  • Think of a controversial topic and list all the various perspectives about it that you can think of or discover. If people of various perspectives were in your audience, how might you acknowledge them during your introduction?

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4 Audience Analysis

Understanding Your Audience

In this chapter . . .

In this chapter, we will consider the role of the audience in determining the full speaking occasion. What factors about your audience will be the most important in maximizing the effectiveness of your communication? What ethical considerations must be considered? How does your identity intersect with the audience?

Who is your audience? For a speech to be public, it requires an audience, even if that audience is virtual or imagined. When you give a speech, the audience isn’t merely a passive witness, but instead is actively creating a relationship with you. Communication is a two-way street. Therefore, it’s important to consider the needs of the audience in both the construction and delivery of your speech.

How large will the audience be? Do you personally know the members of the audience? Is it your classmates, colleagues, friends and family, or the general public? Are they all members of a particular organization? Are you a part of the same group as your audience or are you an outsider? What is their age range and other demographic factors? Did they choose to hear you speak or was it a requirement? What is their experience and interest level in your topic?

The audience is gathered because of a common interest, commitment, or responsibility. What is it? Everything you do in the speech should be relevant to that reason for their being there. What does the audience expect as to type of speech, length, kinds of sources used, and presentation aids or lack of them?

In this chapter, we’ll take a closer look at how a public speaker can understand their anticipated audience.

Ethical Audience Analysis

Every ten years, the United States conducts a nationwide survey of the population of our country. With each census, the questionnaire is revised. For example, on the 1920 census is a question about “color or race” has no enumerators for Hispanic origin. In 2020, our most recent census, the questionnaire included a range of enumerators including Latino, Mexican, Chicano, and Cuban. In 1920, the census simply inquired “Sex” in question number nine, whereas the 2020 census specified “Male” and “Female.” It instructed respondents to “Mark ONE box.” Will that change in the next census, in 2030?

The U.S. Census  is an extraordinary but imperfect way of gathering information about the population of the United States. It also demonstrates that what we know about any group of people is a product of what we are capable of asking.

As a public speaker, what are you capable of asking? For some speech occasions, you might be able to conduct an audience survey. For most speech occasions, the person who is organizing the event should be able to tell you something about who will be in the audience. From this information you may be able to make reasonable assumptions about your audience. For example, if you have been asked to speak at a university student governance meeting, you can assume that everyone in the room shares at least an education level (H.S. diploma) and a group affiliation (students). You can safely assume that most will be between the ages of 18 and 22, but you can’t assume the audience is comprised of a single religion, race, or ethnicity.

While audience analysis is useful, it also has its limitations. Demographic and psychographic factors discussed in this chapter can help you understand something about who your audience might be, what they might know, and what they might care about. But if you don’t use the information wisely or if you’re not careful about your assumptions, you’ll find yourself  stereotyping or totalizing.  

Stereotyping is generalizing about a group of people and assuming that because a few people in that group have a characteristic, all of them do.

Totalizing is taking one characteristic of a group or person and making that the “totality” or sum total of what that person or group is. If a speaker before a group of professional women totalizes and concludes that some perception of “women’s issues” are all they care about, the speaker will be less effective and possibly unethical.

Being ethical about audience analysis means avoiding unlikely assumptions, stereotyping, and totalizing. Below are more detailed descriptions of demographic and psychographic factors in audience analysis.

Demographic Factors

Demographic factors are aspects of an individual’s identity that determine their place in society and membership in particular subcultures. They can be measured socially. One way to think of demographics is the “facts” of an individual. This consists of the type of questions you find on medical or government forms.

Common Demographic Categories

We traditionally ascribe certain roles, behaviors, motivations, interests, and concerns to people of certain ages. Young people are concerned about career choices; people over 60 are concerned about retirement. People go to college from the age of 18 to about 22. People 50 years old have raised their children and are “empty nesters. These neat categories still exist for many, but in some respects, they are outdated.

The second demographic characteristic commonly listed is gender. This area is open to misunderstanding as much as any other. Today, more people openly identify as a gender other than traditionally male or female. Even those of us who identify as male or female don’t fully follow traditional gender roles. This is an area for growing sensitivity. At the same time, the purpose, subject, and context of the speech will probably define how and whether you address the demographic characteristic of gender.

Unless the audience is brought together because of common faith concerns or the group shares the same affiliation or commitment, religious faith may not be relevant to your topic and not a crucial factor in the audience analysis. As with other categories, be careful not to assume or stereotype about religious groups. You should be conscious of the diversity of your audience. Not everyone worships in a church, and not everyone attends a house of worship on Sunday. Be attentive to inclusive language.

Group Affiliation

One source of identity for some is group affiliation. To what groups do members of the audience predominantly belong? Sometimes it will be useful to know if the group is mostly Republican, Democrat, members of a union, members of a professional organization, and so on. Be mindful of what the group values and what binds the audience together.

Region relates to where the audience members live. We can think of this in two ways. We live in regions of the country: Northeast, Southeast, Midwest, Rocky Mountain region, Northwest, and West Coast. These regions can be broken down even more, such as coastal Southeastern states. The second way to think about region is as “residence” or whether the audience lives in an urban area, the suburbs, or a rural area.

Occupation may be a demographic characteristic that is central to your presentation. For the most part in the U.S., we choose our occupations because they reflect our values, interests, and abilities, and as we associate with colleagues in that occupation, those values, interests, and abilities are strengthened.

The next demographic characteristic is education, which is closely tied to occupation and is often, though not always, a matter of choice. In the United States, education usually reflects what kind of information and training a person has been exposed to, but it does not reflect intelligence. We are also generally proud of our educational achievements, so they should not be disregarded.

Socio-economic Level

Socio-economic level is also tied to occupation and education in many cases. Often, you can’t know the socio-economic level of your audience members, you should be careful about references that would portray your own level as superior.

Family Status

Family status, such as whether the audience members are married, single, divorced, or have children or grandchildren may be particularly important to the concerns and values of your audience and even the reason the audience is brought together. For example, young parents could gather to listen to a speaker because they are concerned about the health and safety of children in the community.

Race and Ethnicity

In some areas, it’s necessary to gather demographic information about race and ethnicity. For example, a university wants to measure the diversity of their student body. But for the purposes of audience analysis, the most ethical way to think about the category of race and ethnicity is to minimize your assumptions about homogeneity and maximize understanding of diversity. Many people identify as multiracial and rare is the person who can identify with only one ethnicity. Race and ethnicity can’t be judged only by appearance. As a casual public speaker and not a demographer, you’re not equipped with the information to know about your audience’s racial and ethnic identity if that information isn’t specifically communicated to you. Rather than make erroneous assumptions, embrace as a probability that your audience is comprised of a diversity of races and ethnicities.

Psychographic Factors

Psychographic factors are psychological characteristics that determine how a person thinks. While these factors are most important during a persuasive speech, they may be applicable to any type of speech.

Common Psychographic Factors

Beliefs are statements we hold to be true. Notice this definition does not say the beliefs are true, only that we hold them to be true and as such they determine how we respond to the world around us. Beliefs touch all aspects of our experience. Beliefs come from our experience and from sources we trust. Therefore, beliefs are hard to change—not impossible, just difficult.

Attitude is defined as a stable positive or negative response to a person, idea, object, or policy. How do you respond when you hear the name of a certain singer, movie star, political leader, sports team, or law in your state? Your response will be either positive or negative, or maybe neutral if you’re not familiar with the object of the attitude. Where did that attitude come from? Attitude comes from experiences, peer groups, beliefs, rewards, and punishments.

Values are goals we strive for and what we consider important and desirable. We can engage in the same behavior but for different values; one person may participate in a river cleanup because they value the future of the planet; another may value the appearance of the community in which they live; another just because friends are involved, and they value relationships.

Needs are important deficiencies that we are motivated to fulfill. Your audience members are experiencing both “felt” and “real” needs. A “felt” need is a strong “want” that the person believes will fulfill or satisfy them even if the item isn’t necessary for survival. As great as WIFI and coffee are, they are not crucial to human survival, but we do want them so strongly that they operate as needs.

Who Are You to Your Audience?

While preparing for a speech, take a moment to reflect on who you are as a person, and who you are as a public speaker. Are you outgoing and confident, or are you more reserved? Do you naturally talk with your hands? Are you comfortable expressing emotions and vulnerability? Do you like incorporating humor? What are your strengths as a public speaker? What skills are you working to develop that require more conscious effort? You may want to play to your strengths, or you may intentionally wish to challenge yourself.

If you’re giving a speech on a particular topic, the assumption is that you have some level of familiarity with the topic of the speech. Are you particularly knowledgeable about the subject or do you have personal experience? Part of building a rapport with the audience is to establish your credibility. Why should they trust you or care what you have to say? Even if you’re not an expert in the subject matter it’s helpful to express your genuine interest in a topic and to position your level of knowledge. Additionally, it’s important to ground facts and arguments in relation to outside sources.

You’re not using the speech to dump a large amount of content on the audience; you’re making that content important, meaningful, and applicable to them. What are their needs and expectations? Additionally, the way the audience perceives you and your connection to them—such as whether there is mutual trust and respect—will determine your success with the audience. The speaker must respect the audience and the audience should trust the speaker.

Applying Audience Analysis

Now that you know the categories that comprise demographic and psychographic factors, and you see that it’s important to take stock of yourself in the speaking circumstances, you can use all these elements systematically to improve your speech. In the beginning of this chapter, we discussed Ethical Audience Analysis. With information gathered directly or from the organizer of the event, you can strive to make reasonable assumptions about your audience while avoiding unlikely assumptions, stereotyping, and totalizing.

Homogenous or Heterogeneous Audiences

Among the most important distinctions you can make in audience analysis is recognizing if an audience shares many key demographic and psychographic features, or if an audience contains a mixture of people with few demographic and psychographic features in common. We call this homogeneous versus heterogeneous audiences. The speech occasion usually dictates the makeup of the audience and whether they are heterogeneous or homogeneous. Due to our diverse society, many public speeches will have a heterogeneous audience. However, if you’re asked to speak to a particular group or at a specialized event, the audience may be more homogeneous.

Imagine speaking before a boy’s youth group at a Christian church event. This is a homogeneous group because of many shared demographic (age, gender, religion, group affiliation) and shared psychographic (beliefs, attitudes) factors. You could lean into this shared sense of identity to connect with audience members through examples and references that are tailored to their demographic. However, a group of first year college students at an orientation event is heterogeneous because of diversity in key demographics (gender, race, ethnicity, religion) and psychographics (beliefs, attitudes, needs). Even though first-year college students may share a similar age and identity at a particular university, those shared factors may be less salient than their diversity. Particularly with a heterogeneous group, you want to use inclusive language and not alienate audience members who have divergent backgrounds. Think about how your speech can engage people on multiple levels so that regardless of their background they are able to relate to your message.

Using Your Analysis

The conclusions you draw about the composition of your audience are only useful if you let these conclusions shape the way you write and deliver your speech. Here are some questions to guide you:

  • Knowing my audience, is my topic interesting and relevant? If the topic is chosen for me, how should I approach the assignment to make the topic interesting and relevant to this particular audience?
  • What level of vocabulary is appropriate for this audience? Should my speech be more accessible? More formal?
  • What is the right demeanor for presenting to this audience?
  • Given who I am as a speaker, how can I build rapport with this specific audience?
  • Are there terms or ideas that I need to carefully explain? Or will these be familiar to my audience?
  • How will I motivate this specific audience to listen to my speech?
  • Does my speech topic, content, or vocabulary make assumptions about homogeneity that are not true for my audience?

Identifying and analyzing the who, what, where, when, and why of given circumstances will help you to determine the how of preparing for the speaking occasion. Additionally, ethical audience analysis can be useful in determining particular themes, language, and research sources to either employ or avoid to best connect with the audience. Furthermore, you’ll be able to decide how you’ll deliver the speech (options for delivery will be covered in the next chapter). Below is a worksheet to aid in the process.

Something to Think About

Imagine you’re asked to give a five-minute informative speech that explains the idea of the “three branches” (executive, judiciary, and legislative) of governance that forms our American democracy. You couldn’t possibly know how to write this informative speech unless you knew who your audience was going to be. Consider how different your speech would be in these three imagined circumstances:

  • You’re on a study abroad program in a foreign country, and students are giving class presentations about the government of their home country. Your audience is: non-American college students.
  • You’re visiting a second-grade class for a job interview as a teacher, and they have asked you to explain this important idea to the students. Your audience is: second graders.
  • You’re a student in law school, and in a moot court exercise, you must explain the three branches of government to the jury. Your audience is: adult American citizens.

Common sense would tell you that these different audiences require a different approach to the speech: different in the way you write it; and different in the way you deliver it. In everyday conversation and informal speaking, you instinctually adjust what you say and how you say it according to your audience. A public speaker needs to be more conscious and deliberate about these adjustments.

For instance, an audience that is mostly young kids or older adults will require you to intentionally speak slower and extra clearly. Unless speaking to a group with particular knowledge about a subject, avoid jargon and be mindful to define any unfamiliar terms or concepts. If you’re addressing an unfamiliar audience lean towards a more formal tone.

Public Speaking as Performance Copyright © 2023 by Mechele Leon is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

Analyzing Audience Response: An Essential Skill for Effective Presenters

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Analyzing Audience Response

Presenting to an audience can be a daunting task. It’s been estimated that a staggering 75% of all people have at least some fear of public speaking. Chances are, a decent amount of presenters in a given situation feel some level of anxiety.

But what separates a solid presenter from a great one? It’s their ability to read the room, know their style, and adapt it to any audience. You need to be able to assess how your audience is responding and adjust accordingly.

By understanding this skill of analyzing audience response, presenters can better react effectively and make meaningful connections with their audiences, leading to more successful overall presentations.

Assessing Your Presentation Skills

Being able to estimate one's own presentation skills is a critical aspect of success for any presenter. It requires examining an audience’s response to the delivered material and how it was presented. Analyzing audience response is, therefore, essential for effective presenters.

By studying their presentation style and taking into account feedback from previous presentations, a presenter can identify areas where they are succeeding or struggling in delivery, organization, and content. 

Let’s say you’re giving a presentation to college students, and you get feedback that your slides weren’t organized well and the content was too technical. By using that feedback, you should be able to determine what needs to change to better engage with your audience. You may need to revise the structure of your slides and use simpler language.

You can also ask for help from colleagues, or take a course to improve your presentation skills. Additionally, practice makes perfect – try delivering the same presentation multiple times to hone your skills and become more confident.

Assessing Your Presentation Skills

Observing how the audience responds to the presentation will help you identify areas that need improvement. You can also use surveys or polls to get direct feedback from your audience so you know what techniques are working and which ones need tweaking.

Overall, getting honest feedback is essential for improving your presentations, revising content and delivery so they’re more suitable for specific audiences.

Developing Your Presentation Style

As we’ve discussed, an essential skill for effective presenters is the ability to interpret audience response. This requires an understanding of how people respond differently according to their own personalities, backgrounds, and experiences. A key component of this analysis recognizes one's own presentation style. 

Presentation styles can vary widely depending on the situation and the presenter’s purpose, ranging from a formal speech with slides or props to an informal discussion without visuals. It may also involve body language, tone of voice, choice of words and level of energy used in order to engage with the audience properly.

For instance, if you’re having a presentation at one of the top colleges in the country , your audience will likely expect a highly professional and polished presentation with strong visuals. On the other hand, presenting to a casual crowd of friends may require more lighthearted content with anecdotes or humor.

Developing Your Presentation Style

No matter the situation, understanding your personal presentation style can be an invaluable asset for any presenter. Take some time to reflect on how you come across when speaking publicly and what methods you can employ to better engage with your audience. This will help ensure that your message is received in an effective and meaningful way.

Key Elements of Effective Presentations

Key Elements of Effective Presentations

Presenting effectively is a skill that can be developed through practice and specific techniques. Key elements to consider when giving presentations include, capturing an audience's attention, communicating with clarity, answering questions thoughtfully, and studying responses for further improvement.

Understand The Audience

You need to understand your audience before giving the presentation. This includes researching their background and interests, as well as paying attention to body language, facial expressions, and questions during your talk.

In addition, this can provide valuable feedback for presenters about what topics need further explanation, which strategies are most successful in engaging the audience, and where they may have lost clarity or focus in their delivery. Thus, having an awareness of these insights can help them better tailor future presentations according to specific audiences’ needs and preferences.

Consequently, this capacity to interpret and respond appropriately to audience reactions has become an invaluable skill set for any public speaker seeking success in both professional and personal contexts.

Prepare The Content

Presenters need to prepare their content in advance to effectively engage an audience. And that includes researching the topic and ensuring all material is relevant to the listeners. It also requires assessing potential questions or issues during the presentation and determining how best to address them with the audience. In addition, any visual aids should be created before presenting, and tested so there will not be any unexpected delays due to technical difficulties.

Before beginning the presentation, the presenter must clearly understand what points they wish to convey. Understanding the relevance of each point made and why certain information needs to be shared is key to maintaining focus throughout the entire talk. Having an effective structure, such as using signposts, transitions, and summaries can help keep both presenter and the audience stay on track, while providing clarity at every step along the way. 

Being able to anticipate possible reactions from various groups within an audience enables presenters to plan ahead accordingly and better connect with them through meaningful dialogue. Therefore, thorough preparation of content is essential for successful presentations.

Deliver With Confidence

Delivering a presentation is important to presenting and engaging with the audience. To do this effectively, confidence in delivery is key. 

A confident presenter will be able to engage better with their audience, as well as make sure that they are comprehending the information being presented. Self-assurance can also help build trust in the presenter and the delivered content.

Understanding how to analyze an audience's responses can help presenters plan for different scenarios when delivering presentations. That knowledge enables them to adapt their approach quickly if needed, and adjust their tone or message depending on what kind of reaction they receive from those listening. 

Speakers can ensure effective communication by scrutinizing responses during a presentation and addressing any issues or confusion immediately rather than waiting until the end of the section.

Control The Environment

The ability to analyze audience response effectively is essential for effective presenters. For this purpose, controlling the environment in which presentations take place can help greatly. That includes factors such as the physical space, temperature, lighting, and sound within the room or venue. Additionally, creating an atmosphere that encourages openness and allows questions from the audience should also be an aim.

In addition to managing the external environment, a presenter needs to pay attention to their audience's non-verbal cues while presenting. Things like body language, facial expression, and posture display how engaged people are with a presentation and provide valuable insights into how well received it is. 

By keeping track of these signs throughout the event, presenters can adjust their delivery accordingly to tailor their message to what resonates best with the audience. With these tools, analyzing audience responses becomes much easier and more accurate.

Mastering Response Analysis to Become a Better Presenter

By being aware of these elements, presenters will better understand how their audience responds and adjust accordingly. Audience response analysis is necessary for producing an engaging yet informative presentation that resonates with listeners.

Disclaimer: this article includes a paid product promotion.

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Powerful and Effective Presentation Skills: More in Demand Now Than Ever

audience analysis in presentation skills

When we talk with our L&D colleagues from around the globe, we often hear that presentation skills training is one of the top opportunities they’re looking to provide their learners. And this holds true whether their learners are individual contributors, people managers, or senior leaders. This is not surprising.

Effective communications skills are a powerful career activator, and most of us are called upon to communicate in some type of formal presentation mode at some point along the way.

For instance, you might be asked to brief management on market research results, walk your team through a new process, lay out the new budget, or explain a new product to a client or prospect. Or you may want to build support for a new idea, bring a new employee into the fold, or even just present your achievements to your manager during your performance review.

And now, with so many employees working from home or in hybrid mode, and business travel in decline, there’s a growing need to find new ways to make effective presentations when the audience may be fully virtual or a combination of in person and remote attendees.

Whether you’re making a standup presentation to a large live audience, or a sit-down one-on-one, whether you’re delivering your presentation face to face or virtually, solid presentation skills matter.

Even the most seasoned and accomplished presenters may need to fine-tune or update their skills. Expectations have changed over the last decade or so. Yesterday’s PowerPoint which primarily relied on bulleted points, broken up by the occasional clip-art image, won’t cut it with today’s audience.

The digital revolution has revolutionized the way people want to receive information. People expect presentations that are more visually interesting. They expect to see data, metrics that support assertions. And now, with so many previously in-person meetings occurring virtually, there’s an entirely new level of technical preparedness required.

The leadership development tools and the individual learning opportunities you’re providing should include presentation skills training that covers both the evergreen fundamentals and the up-to-date capabilities that can make or break a presentation.

So, just what should be included in solid presentation skills training? Here’s what I think.

The fundamentals will always apply When it comes to making a powerful and effective presentation, the fundamentals will always apply. You need to understand your objective. Is it strictly to convey information, so that your audience’s knowledge is increased? Is it to persuade your audience to take some action? Is it to convince people to support your idea? Once you understand what your objective is, you need to define your central message. There may be a lot of things you want to share with your audience during your presentation, but find – and stick with – the core, the most important point you want them to walk away with. And make sure that your message is clear and compelling.

You also need to tailor your presentation to your audience. Who are they and what might they be expecting? Say you’re giving a product pitch to a client. A technical team may be interested in a lot of nitty-gritty product detail. The business side will no doubt be more interested in what returns they can expect on their investment.

Another consideration is the setting: is this a formal presentation to a large audience with questions reserved for the end, or a presentation in a smaller setting where there’s the possibility for conversation throughout? Is your presentation virtual or in-person? To be delivered individually or as a group? What time of the day will you be speaking? Will there be others speaking before you and might that impact how your message will be received?

Once these fundamentals are established, you’re in building mode. What are the specific points you want to share that will help you best meet your objective and get across your core message? Now figure out how to convey those points in the clearest, most straightforward, and succinct way. This doesn’t mean that your presentation has to be a series of clipped bullet points. No one wants to sit through a presentation in which the presenter reads through what’s on the slide. You can get your points across using stories, fact, diagrams, videos, props, and other types of media.

Visual design matters While you don’t want to clutter up your presentation with too many visual elements that don’t serve your objective and can be distracting, using a variety of visual formats to convey your core message will make your presentation more memorable than slides filled with text. A couple of tips: avoid images that are cliched and overdone. Be careful not to mix up too many different types of images. If you’re using photos, stick with photos. If you’re using drawn images, keep the style consistent. When data are presented, stay consistent with colors and fonts from one type of chart to the next. Keep things clear and simple, using data to support key points without overwhelming your audience with too much information. And don’t assume that your audience is composed of statisticians (unless, of course, it is).

When presenting qualitative data, brief videos provide a way to engage your audience and create emotional connection and impact. Word clouds are another way to get qualitative data across.

Practice makes perfect You’ve pulled together a perfect presentation. But it likely won’t be perfect unless it’s well delivered. So don’t forget to practice your presentation ahead of time. Pro tip: record yourself as you practice out loud. This will force you to think through what you’re going to say for each element of your presentation. And watching your recording will help you identify your mistakes—such as fidgeting, using too many fillers (such as “umm,” or “like”), or speaking too fast.

A key element of your preparation should involve anticipating any technical difficulties. If you’ve embedded videos, make sure they work. If you’re presenting virtually, make sure that the lighting is good, and that your speaker and camera are working. Whether presenting in person or virtually, get there early enough to work out any technical glitches before your presentation is scheduled to begin. Few things are a bigger audience turn-off than sitting there watching the presenter struggle with the delivery mechanisms!

Finally, be kind to yourself. Despite thorough preparation and practice, sometimes, things go wrong, and you need to recover in the moment, adapt, and carry on. It’s unlikely that you’ll have caused any lasting damage and the important thing is to learn from your experience, so your next presentation is stronger.

How are you providing presentation skills training for your learners?

Manika Gandhi is Senior Learning Design Manager at Harvard Business Publishing Corporate Learning. Email her at [email protected] .

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What Are Effective Presentation Skills (and How to Improve Them)

Presentation skills are essential for your personal and professional life. Learn about effective presentations and how to boost your presenting techniques.

[Featured Image]: The marketing manager, wearing a yellow top, is making a PowerPoint presentation.

At least seven out of 10 Americans agree that presentation skills are essential for a successful career [ 1 ]. Although it might be tempting to think that these are skills reserved for people interested in public speaking roles, they're critical in a diverse range of jobs. For example, you might need to brief your supervisor on research results.

Presentation skills are also essential in other scenarios, including working with a team and explaining your thought process, walking clients through project ideas and timelines, and highlighting your strengths and achievements to your manager during performance reviews.

Whatever the scenario, you have very little time to capture your audience’s attention and get your point across when presenting information—about three seconds, according to research [ 2 ]. Effective presentation skills help you get your point across and connect with the people you’re communicating with, which is why nearly every employer requires them.

Understanding what presentation skills are is only half the battle. Honing your presenting techniques is essential for mastering presentations of all kinds and in all settings.

What are presentation skills?

Presentation skills are the abilities and qualities necessary for creating and delivering a compelling presentation that effectively communicates information and ideas. They encompass what you say, how you structure it, and the materials you include to support what you say, such as slides, videos, or images.

You'll make presentations at various times in your life. Examples include:

Making speeches at a wedding, conference, or another event

Making a toast at a dinner or event

Explaining projects to a team 

Delivering results and findings to management teams

Teaching people specific methods or information

Proposing a vote at community group meetings

Pitching a new idea or business to potential partners or investors

Why are presentation skills important? 

Delivering effective presentations is critical in your professional and personal life. You’ll need to hone your presentation skills in various areas, such as when giving a speech, convincing your partner to make a substantial purchase, and talking to friends and family about an important situation.

No matter if you’re using them in a personal or professional setting, these are the skills that make it easier and more effective to convey your ideas, convince or persuade others, and experience success. A few of the benefits that often accompany improving your presentation skills include:

Enriched written and verbal communication skills

Enhanced confidence and self-image

Boosted critical thinking and problem-solving capabilities

Better motivational techniques

Increased leadership skills

Expanded time management, negotiation, and creativity

The better your presenting techniques, the more engaging your presentations will be. You could also have greater opportunities to make positive impacts in business and other areas of your life.

Effective presentation skills

Imagine yourself in the audience at a TED Talk or sitting with your coworkers at a big meeting held by your employer. What would you be looking for in how they deliver their message? What would make you feel engaged?

These are a few questions to ask yourself as you review this list of some of the most effective presentation skills.

Verbal communication

How you use language and deliver messages play essential roles in how your audience will receive your presentation. Speak clearly and confidently, projecting your voice enough to ensure everyone can hear. Think before you speak, pausing when necessary and tailoring the way you talk to resonate with your particular audience.

Body language

Body language combines various critical elements, including posture, gestures, eye contact, expressions, and position in front of the audience. Body language is one of the elements that can instantly transform a presentation that would otherwise be dull into one that's dynamic and interesting.

Voice projection

The ability to project your voice improves your presentation by allowing your audience to hear what you're saying. It also increases your confidence to help settle any lingering nerves while also making your message more engaging. To project your voice, stand comfortably with your shoulders back. Take deep breaths to power your speaking voice and ensure you enunciate every syllable you speak.

How you present yourself plays a role in your body language and ability to project your voice. It also sets the tone for the presentation. Avoid slouching or looking overly tense. Instead, remain open, upright, and adaptable while taking the formality of the occasion into account.

Storytelling

Incorporating storytelling into a presentation is an effective strategy used by many powerful public speakers. It has the power to bring your subject to life and pique the audience’s curiosity. Don’t be afraid to tell a personal story, slowly building up suspense or adding a dramatic moment. And, of course, be sure to end with a positive takeaway to drive your point home.

Active listening

Active listening is a valuable skill all on its own. When you understand and thoughtfully respond to what you hear—whether it's in a conversation or during a presentation—you’ll likely deepen your personal relationships and actively engage audiences during a presentation. As part of your presentation skill set, it helps catch and maintain the audience’s attention, helping them remain focused while minimizing passive response, ensuring the message is delivered correctly, and encouraging a call to action.

Stage presence

During a presentation, projecting confidence can help keep your audience engaged. Stage presence can help you connect with your audience and encourage them to want to watch you. To improve your presence, try amping up your normal demeanor by infusing it with a bit of enthusiasm. Project confidence and keep your information interesting.

Watch your audience as you’re presenting. If you’re holding their attention, it likely means you’re connecting well with them.

Self-awareness

Monitoring your own emotions and reactions will allow you to react well in various situations. It helps you remain personable throughout your presentation and handle feedback well. Self-awareness can help soothe nervousness during presentations, allowing you to perform more effectively.

Writing skills

Writing is a form of presentation. Sharp writing skills can help you master your presentation’s outline to ensure you stay on message and remain clear about your objectives from the beginning until the end. It’s also helpful to have strong writing abilities for creating compelling slides and other visual aids.

Understanding an audience

When you understand your audience's needs and interests, you can design your presentation around them. In turn, you'll deliver maximum value to them and enhance your ability to make your message easy to understand.

Learn more about presentation skills from industry experts at SAP:

How to improve presentation skills

There’s an art to public speaking. Just like any other type of art, this is one that requires practice. Improving your presentation skills will help reduce miscommunications, enhance your time management capabilities, and boost your leadership skills. Here are some ways you can improve these skills:

Work on self-confidence.

When you’re confident, you naturally speak more clearly and with more authority. Taking the time to prepare your presentation with a strong opening and compelling visual aids can help you feel more confident. Other ways to improve your self-confidence include practicing positive self-talk, surrounding yourself with positive people, and avoiding comparing yourself (or your presentation) to others.

Develop strategies for overcoming fear.

Many people are nervous or fearful before giving a presentation. A bad memory of a past performance or insufficient self-confidence can contribute to fear and anxiety. Having a few go-to strategies like deep breathing, practicing your presentation, and grounding can help you transform that fear into extra energy to put into your stage presence.

Learn grounding techniques.

Grounding is any type of technique that helps you steer your focus away from distressing thoughts and keeps you connected with your present self. To ground yourself, stand with your feet shoulder-width apart and imagine you’re a large, mature tree with roots extending deep into the earth—like the tree, you can become unshakable.

Learn how to use presentation tools.

Visual aids and other technical support can transform an otherwise good presentation into a wow-worthy one. A few popular presentation tools include:

Canva: Provides easy-to-design templates you can customize

Powtoon: Animation software that makes video creation fast and easy

PowerPoint: Microsoft's iconic program popular for dynamic marketing and sales presentations

Practice breathing techniques.

Breathing techniques can help quell anxiety, making it easier to shake off pre-presentation jitters and nerves. It also helps relax your muscles and get more oxygen to your brain.  For some pre-presentation calmness, you can take deep breaths, slowly inhaling through your nose and exhaling through your mouth.

While presenting, breathe in through your mouth with the back of your tongue relaxed so your audience doesn't hear a gasping sound. Speak on your exhalation, maintaining a smooth voice.

Gain experience.

The more you practice, the better you’ll become. The more you doanything, the more comfortable you’ll feel engaging in that activity. Presentations are no different. Repeatedly practicing your own presentation also offers the opportunity to get feedback from other people and tweak your style and content as needed.

Tips to help you ace your presentation

Your presentation isn’t about you; it’s about the material you’re presenting. Sometimes, reminding yourself of this ahead of taking center stage can help take you out of your head, allowing you to connect effectively with your audience. The following are some of the many actions you can take on the day of your presentation.

Arrive early.

Since you may have a bit of presentation-related anxiety, it’s important to avoid adding travel stress. Give yourself an abundance of time to arrive at your destination, and take into account heavy traffic and other unforeseen events. By arriving early, you also give yourself time to meet with any on-site technicians, test your equipment, and connect with people ahead of the presentation.

Become familiar with the layout of the room.

Arriving early also gives you time to assess the room and figure out where you want to stand. Experiment with the acoustics to determine how loudly you need to project your voice, and test your equipment to make sure everything connects and appears properly with the available setup. This is an excellent opportunity to work out any last-minute concerns and move around to familiarize yourself with the setting for improved stage presence.

Listen to presenters ahead of you.

When you watch others present, you'll get a feel for the room's acoustics and lighting. You can also listen for any data that’s relevant to your presentation and revisit it during your presentation—this can make the presentation more interactive and engaging.

Use note cards.

Writing yourself a script could provide you with more comfort. To prevent sounding too robotic or disengaged, only include talking points in your note cards in case you get off track. Using note cards can help keep your presentation organized while sounding more authentic to your audience.

Learn to deliver clear and confident presentations with Dynamic Public Speaking from the University of Washington. Build confidence, develop new delivery techniques, and practice strategies for crafting compelling presentations for different purposes, occasions, and audiences.

Article sources

Forbes. “ New Survey: 70% Say Presentation Skills are Critical for Career Success , https://www.forbes.com/sites/carminegallo/2014/09/25/new-survey-70-percent-say-presentation-skills-critical-for-career-success/?sh=619f3ff78890.” Accessed December 7, 2022.

Beautiful.ai. “ 15 Presentation and Public Speaking Stats You Need to Know , https://www.beautiful.ai/blog/15-presentation-and-public-speaking-stats-you-need-to-know. Accessed December 7, 2022.

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Editorial Team

Coursera’s editorial team is comprised of highly experienced professional editors, writers, and fact...

This content has been made available for informational purposes only. Learners are advised to conduct additional research to ensure that courses and other credentials pursued meet their personal, professional, and financial goals.

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audience analysis in presentation skills

Home Market Research Research Tools and Apps

Audience Analysis: Definition with types and uses

Audience analysis gives marketers actionable customer insights that help them create smarter content and social strategies. Read more.

It can be hard to figure out who your audience is and what they want, both in business and beyond. You can use audience analysis to learn more about your audience and how to serve them better.

To reach your full potential, you must improve your analysis of the audience skills. In the age of online, it is easier than ever to capture audience data. If you perform this analysis, you can figure out your effective audience and reach your maximum potential while keeping them in mind. In this article, you will learn about the analysis of the audience, its types, and its uses.

What is audience analysis?

Audience analysis is the method of obtaining information about the people in your audience to better understand their wants, needs, values, and attitudes. 

It would be best if you first defined your target audience by determining their demographics, such as their gender, age, and where they live. After you’ve defined the potential audiences, you’ll be able to narrow the list down to a single target group for in-depth analysis .

Intended analysis of the audience has always been key to a successful business. Because of advanced technology, this process is perhaps simpler than ever before. Companies now have easy access to a wide range of audience information via social media channels.

If you can turn all that data into clear insights about your audience and what they care about, you can design a better business strategy.

Types of audience analysis

There are three types of audience analysis:

Demographic analysis

Psychographic analysis.

  • Situational analysis.

Let’s look at these types!

Types of Audience Analysis

Demographic data include things like gender, age range, marital status, race and ethnicity, and socioeconomic status. You probably already know how many male and female students are in your public speaking class, how old they are roughly, and so on.

But how can you figure out who will be in an audience if you have never talked to them? Most of the time, you can ask the person or group that asked you to speak. They can probably tell you a lot about the types of people who are expected to come to hear you.

No matter what method you use to collect demographic information, be respectful from the start. For example, if you want to know if people in the audience have ever been divorced, you should know that not everyone will want to answer your questions. You can’t demand that they do it. And you can’t just guess why they don’t want to talk about it. You have to give them some space.

  • Age is not just a number, as it can tell a lot about a person. For example, teens and people in their 20s have no memory of wars or living under a totalitarian regime.
  • Even in the same culture, women and men have different experiences based on their gender. For instance, women are often kept out of jobs that are thought to be better suited for men.
  • Religions are also very different: Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism, Islam, Hinduism, and many more. Even within Christianity, there are Roman Catholic, Mormon, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Orthodox (Greek and Russian), and many Protestant denominations.
  • In the demographic analysis , the level and type of education are also essential factors. An airplane mechanic gets a very different education and training than an accountant, musician, or software engineer. Fraternities and sororities, sports teams, campus organizations, political parties, volunteer work, and cultural communities all shape how we see the world.
  • Lastly, their jobs affect people’s ideas and interests because most appointments are misunderstood in many ways. For example, many think teachers work eight hours a day and get the summer off.

By doing demographic data analysis, you can find out a lot about your customers, as you can see. The best part is that many tools make it easy to do this analysis. For example, if you run ads on Facebook or Google, these platforms already have a way for you to study your audience that you can use.

Demographic information is pretty clear and easy to check, but psychographic information is not that easy to understand. A psychographic analysis looks at things like values, beliefs, opinions, and attitudes. Even though two people say they don’t buy junk food, they might have very different ideas about what foods are “junk food.”

Audiences will likely already know two main things: what you’re talking about and your brand. Psychographic segmentation can show how your audience is limited by the ideas they already have. If you know about these ideas ahead of time, you can write your message in a way that fits them.

  • There may be misconceptions or stereotypes about your topic that people already know. When you do your audience analysis, include questions that show how much your audience already knows about your case. Try to find out if they have any stereotypes, oversimplified ideas, or biased beliefs about it. This could change the message you want to send and how you want to send it.
  • On the other hand, pre-existing ideas about your brand are more about how customers see you at first. But it would be best if you focused on meeting the needs and interests of your audience, not on changing their minds about you or managing your image.

Google Trends is one way to do a psychographic analysis. Google Trends can be used to find the latest trends, but it can also be used to track marketing performance.

LEARN ABOUT: Level of Analysis

Situational analysis

In the realm of more traditional forms of speech, situational aspects of an audience include the audience’s size, attitude toward the speaker, prior knowledge of the topic, and occasion.

In the world of digital marketing and media, this refers to the size of your preferred audience, their attitude towards your product/company, their prior knowledge, and the websites or social media channels. They view your advertisements or interact with your products and services by this.

It is more challenging to collect this information when your audience is geographically dispersed because you are not addressing the audience directly at this time. But, similar to a world leader delivering a speech, it is essential to learn how to engage potential customers online, especially in a world of limitless options and audience information.

Uses of audience analysis in your business

Any successful marketing campaign must analyze audience data. Even creating your target audience teaches you about yourself and your smart goals . By understanding your target audiences, you can adapt your messaging to meet their needs and analyze a product’s flexibility in different contexts. Below are two uses of audience analysis:

Customer behavior

By doing audience analysis, you’ll learn how your customers act offline and online. With audience data from social media, you can see what other products and personalities people like. That will helps you figure out what they want.

For example, instead of just figuring out who is most likely to go to a spa, analysis tells you what kinds of treatments people are most likely to want based on the stressors in their lives. Once you have this information, you’ll be able to predict better what services to promote to which groups. This will help you be more successful in the long run by speaking to each person’s needs instead of painting with broad strokes.

Taking risks

There is always a time when a company or small business must decide to grow. Taking risks is a critical component of this growth. But you don’t want to take uninformed risks. With the right audience analysis questions, you can determine what risks are likely to pay off.

For example, if your audience data shows that most of your customers are younger, making changes to fit the needs of that group (like creating a product that is cheaper, more eco-friendly, etc.) helps ensure growth. On the other hand, if the people you want to reach are less tech-savvy, an interesting newsletter sent through email might work better than a social media campaign.

LEARN ABOUT:  Social Communication Questionnaire

In our global, online society, your audience may be spread out around the world. This connected world has lots of audience data. It can be hard to determine customer beliefs and preferences without immediate crowd feedback.

Using social media sites, audience profiles, and understanding where your purchases come from can help with audience analysis. Knowing your audience enables you to make smart choices and save money.

In the end, we had a clear idea of what data analysis is, what types there are, and its uses. Now it’s time to make changes in your organization to match. For your good, we suggest you use QuestionPro, which is much more than survey software. We have a solution for every specific problem and industry.

We also offer data management platforms, like our Insights Hub research repository.

LEARN MORE         FREE TRIAL

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The #1 Rule of Presentations: Know Your Audience

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