3 Ways to Know Your Audience
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): TomKin Consulting LLC.
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2020
Damn right I like the life I live because I went from negative to positive.
– Christopher Wallace (“Notorious B.I.G.”)
Kevin J. Duncan of Be a Better Blogger said, “Know your audience. Know what their expectations are for you. If you’re a humor blogger or your blog is a personal one, congratulations! You can write about whatever you like. The world is your oyster! The rest of us? We need to be careful not to go off-topic too often.”
To have an audience worth having, the primary thing is self-understanding. Stay in your lane, known the lane, it’ll serve you well. Knowing yourself, knowing your lane, you’ll attract an audience targeted properly for you.
What’s the first way to know an audience?
“When you’re just getting started with blogging, you want to make sure you’re using your time and money as wisely as possible. You have a lot on your plate, so you want every minute of your time to pay off,” Mikke of Blogging Explorer advised.
I think Mikke is right. People write for all reasons. Common ones include joy, passion, and finance. It’s enjoyable. It’s a passion. It’s a source of income. All of these are legitimate. Because writing is neutral as an act.
Its translation of meaning comes from the individual. We imbue meaning to writing. So, it’s a creative act. Also, it’s an act of meaning-making. The meaning given comes from you. So, if you reflect, this meaning is part of that self-understanding mentioned earlier.
You need to know yourself first
Look at the most prominent figureheads of industries, every single one has an audience, a following. By definition, these individuals can be defined as leaders. These audiences reflect themselves. The audience follows them because the audience is them.
The best of any profession have this special quality. They have this self-understanding. In knowing themselves, they understand the audience. Because their message resonates with the audience. For me, I don’t like hyperbolic writing. Unless, the subject demands it.
Compare the content in blogs from me to the content from Duncan above, he uses exclamation points, rhetorical flourish questions. Those are his schtick. It’s part of his technique. It’s not bad technical work. But I don’t like it. However, I respect it. Because the message is conveyed by him.
His authentic self is conveying a message. He’s not some other person. He’s not a wannabe of another person who ‘made it.’ His self-understanding comes through a true self. His target audience likes it.
In fact, it shouldn’t be called “target audience,” but “attracted audience.” Because the audience comes the individual based on unique content, an authentic voice. He’s targeting his real self in print, and then attracts an audience through it.
Self-understanding is a lifelong process, so is writing. There is no perfect writing. There’s suitable and unsuitable writing. What’s the audience? What’s the goal? What’s the purpose? What is the intended meaning?
Or if truly great writing found in classics, what plurality of meanings and truths come through the text and change the readers’ lives? If you know yourself better in an honest way, then you can have a firm foundation for knowing the attracted audience or the ‘target audience.’
What is the second way to know your audience?
Pamela Bump at HubSpot said, “Regardless of where you are in blog development, be sure to brainstorm ideas for interesting posts that keep your buyer persona in mind, optimize your web content for SEO, and follow other best-practices that have led businesses to gain ROI from their online content.”
Big data is the current, next, phase of the Computer Age. We’re stuck with it. So, take some judo principles, Daoist ideas, you can move with it. Judo uses the attackers force against them. Daoism functions on forcelessness. Nothing is forced. You use energy only as necessary or redirect it.
Use big data, to bloggers, it’s called analytics or data analytics. Once you have a website, it is a way to gather intel viewers and readers. What do they view? How do they view it? When do they view? How long to they read it?
Data analytics is knowledge analytics
Data analytics helps make ordinary decisions accurate, precise. It’s like the different between a hunch and knowing with 80% accuracy. One is a guideline based on intuition and gut. The other is an estimate based on quantities.
There’s some of a legacy idea behind big data. If you’re writing, over time, you construct a legacy. It’s a legacy that can be mined for insights. In particular, your audience can be mined. Their viewing habits help you.
I think about the two types, viewers and readers. Viewers skim along articles looking for content. Readers get into the material for understanding. Essentially, once a viewer stops to understand, they’re a reader. It depends on the background system of a website or a blog. But you can, typically, know about them.
The data in the backend can tell about a few things about the audience. For one, it can separate what articles are popular and aren’t. Your audience will focus on some material more than others. It’s rare to have everything equivalently viewed.
This legacy of articles can be viewed or read. Focus on those who read, this is on the premise of speaking through your authentic self. Because these are the readers looking for the real you. That’s not only important. It’s crucial. That’s why I would call them the attracted audience instead of the targeted audience.
Your data analytics can tell not only what they read, but when they read. Time and time of day, these can help focus on selecting a time for scheduling material. Also, the character of the posts. Those more read can tell you about the attracted audience/target audience. It can also inform you about yourself.
It can tell you who resonates with the real you. All this data becomes part of a loop of understanding the audience, understanding yourself, and so on. This makes the data analytics knowledge analytics because it provides something immeasurable and invaluable: wisdom.
What is the third way to know your audience?
Sherilynn Macale in TNW said, “…every reader who comes along should be able to feel like they “belong” to the writing. Instead of feeling left out or not ‘cool enough’ to be a part of our readership, they will instead feel included in our very niche community because we’ve taken the time to include them as well.”
I think she’s generally correct. There’s a sense in which having to deal with the self and with the organic audience are two parts of one side of a coin. Who isn’t the audience? Who is not interested in the material at all? That’s the other side of the coin.
You’re writing about UFC. This person is interested in mascara and rouge. They can go together, but not often, probably. Similarly, the people who are on the periphery, the edge. Those who might be interested.
The audience who is not the audience
In some Zen Buddhist traditions, they use paradox as a form of education. Even further, they use paradox to reach little forms of enlightenment. These Zen paradoxes are riddles. They’re called Zen Koans. So, here’s an original, “Who is the audience who is not the audience?”
An audience can’t be an audience and not be an audience. Similarly, imagine if Wallace (quote at the top), said, “Damn right I like the life I live because I went from negative to negative.” Is it “right”? Of course, no, it’s “from negative to positive.”
So, there’s somewhere a deeper truth in the paradox. Something resolving the paradox. The audience who is not the audience is the audience who is not the attracted audience. Those people on the periphery or the edge.
They might be interested in the material. But they don’t know or haven’t been shown. So, let them know or show them, that’s the path forward. How do you draw in individuals who may have an interest? In Macale’s language, how do you make them “belong”?
Give them a feeling of belonging, one way is drop the jargon. It’s not graduate school in metaphysics. It’s the public sphere, civic space. So, the way to attract the audience who is not the audience: write naturally without an awkward forcefulness.
Over time, you will draw in the peripheral readers. You will build the base of core readers, the attracted audience. As well, you will gain more self-understanding. This, in turn, can give understanding of the facets of the audience too.
It’ll make your writing life less negative. It’ll become more positive. Because you’re expressing your real thoughts and attracting genuinely interested people.
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
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