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Audience analysis: the six questions to ask before you write · Speaker Hub
Audience analysis: the six questions to ask before you write
Most speakers research the topic and guess at the room. Six questions, asked of the organizer, change what the talk should be.
•6 min read
Speakers research their topic thoroughly and their audience not at all. Then they deliver a well built talk aimed at nobody in particular.
Six questions fix most of it, and five of them are asked of the organizer.
1. Who is in the room, by role
Not "senior leaders." Which roles, what proportion, and how senior.
The difference between a room of department heads and a room of frontline staff is not tone. It is what the talk can ask people to do. A session that ends with "go and change your handover process" is actionable for one group and frustrating for the other, because they cannot.
Ask for a rough breakdown. Organizers usually have registration data and are happy to share it, and almost nobody asks.
2. Are they here voluntarily
The single most useful question and the one that changes delivery most.
A room that chose to attend your session has already agreed the topic matters. You can go straight in.
A room that was told to attend has not. Somewhere in the first few minutes you have to answer the question they are actually asking, which is why am I here instead of doing my job. If you skip it, you spend the whole session talking past a quiet objection.
Mandatory attendance also changes the energy in the room in a way that is easy to misread as your fault.
3. What have they already heard about this
Check last year's agenda, and ask.
If they had a session on psychological safety eighteen months ago, your introduction to psychological safety is going to feel like a repeat, and the room will disengage early without telling you why.
This is also where the interesting material usually is. What they were told last time, and what has happened since, is a stronger talk than starting from first principles. It is the same gap analysis that makes a pitch land, covered in how to pitch yourself as a speaker.
4. What is on either side of you
The session before yours and the session after.
If you follow something heavy, the room arrives tired. If you follow a break, they arrive scattered. If you are the last slot before lunch, you will lose them at the scheduled end time regardless of how good you are, so plan to finish early.
If the session before covers ground you also cover, find out now. Two speakers delivering the same framework in one morning is a bad look for both, and it is entirely preventable with one email.
5. What does the organizer want to be different afterwards
Ask them directly. The answer is often not what you assumed.
They may want the room energised before a difficult announcement. They may want a specific idea planted ahead of a change programme. They may want a topic raised that they cannot raise themselves.
That is real information about what success means for the person who booked you, and it is frequently the difference between a session that goes well and a session that gets you rebooked.
6. What would make this a failure
The question nobody asks, and it produces the most honest answers.
You will hear things like: if it is too theoretical, if it feels like a telling off, if it turns into a complaint session, if it runs over.
Every one of those is a constraint you would otherwise have discovered afterwards. Organizers answer this question readily because it is the thing they are actually worried about, and being asked it is reassuring in itself.
When you cannot ask
Sometimes there is no useful contact. Then the sources are indirect but not useless.
Last year's agenda, which tells you what this audience has already been given.
Job titles of past attendees, often on the event site or in LinkedIn posts about it.
The trade press for that sector over the last six months, which tells you what is currently on their minds.
Professional forums and communities, which is where the actual language lives. How people describe their own problem is rarely how the industry describes it, and using their phrasing is the fastest way to sound like you know the room.
That last one is the slow part by hand, and it is what audience research is built to shorten, since reading six months of a sector's conversation is an afternoon you probably do not have.
What to do with the answers
Not tone. Content.
Cut anything they already know, which is usually the first third of a general version of your talk. Replace it with something aimed at what they know now.
Change the examples. A hospital audience needs hospital examples, and a generic one signals you did not prepare for them specifically.
Adjust the ask. Make it something this room can actually do on Monday given their authority.
Finding out who will be in the room, what they already know, why they are attending, and what they can actually do with what you tell them. It is the step that decides what the talk should contain, and it happens before writing rather than after.
What should I ask the event organizer?
Who is attending by role and seniority, whether attendance is voluntary, what the session before yours is, what they have heard on this topic before, what the organizer hopes changes afterwards, and what would make the session a failure. The last one produces the most useful answers because it is the question nobody asks them.
How do I research an audience I cannot contact?
Read last year's agenda to see what they have already been given, look at the job titles of past attendees, read the trade press for that sector, and look at what questions come up in their professional forums. The language they use for their own problems is the most useful thing you can take from it.
Audience Research surfaces sourced facts and inferences, but the audience language output, the phrases and pressures a room already uses about itself, is the part most speakers skim past. Here is what it is actually for, and how your notes survive a research refresh.
Sourced facts, labeled inferences, and open questions are not the same kind of evidence, and stage time is where the gap shows. Here is what to do with each one, and the rehearsal step most speakers skip.
