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Know your audience is useless advice. Here is the version that is not. · Speaker Hub
Know your audience is useless advice. Here is the version that is not.
Everyone agrees with it and almost nobody acts on it, because it never says what to find out. Four things, and what each one changes.
•6 min read
Know your audience is the most agreed with advice in speaking and the least acted on, because it never specifies what to know.
Four things. Each one changes something specific.
1. What they already know
Decides what you cut.
Almost every talk has an opening third that establishes the problem exists. For an audience that lives the problem, that third is the section where you lose them, and they will not tell you why.
The correction is not to speak faster through it. It is to remove it and start where they are.
The signal to look for is what they were told last time. Read last year's agenda for the event, and ask the organiser what has been covered on this topic. If they had a session on it eighteen months ago, your introduction is a repeat, and the interesting talk is about what has changed since.
2. What they can act on
Decides your ending.
A room of executives and a room of frontline staff have different authority. The same closing ask is inspiring for one and irritating for the other, because one group can change the process and the other cannot.
This is the most common mismatch in otherwise good talks. The speaker delivers a well argued case and then asks for something the room has no power to do, and everybody leaves slightly deflated without identifying the cause.
Ask for the roles and the seniority split. Then make the ask something this specific room can do on Monday. How to end a speech covers the shape of it.
3. Why they are in the room
Decides your first two minutes.
There are two kinds of audience and they need different openings.
Chose to be there. They already agree the topic matters. You can start.
Told to be there. They have not agreed anything, and they are asking why am I here rather than doing my job. If you do not answer that early, you talk past a quiet objection for the whole session.
Answering it takes one sentence acknowledging the situation honestly. What does not work is pretending everyone is delighted, because the room knows.
This is one question to the organiser and it changes the opening more than any other single fact.
4. What they would push back on
Decides what you have to address.
Every audience has an objection, and it is usually predictable once you know who they are. Resourcing. Having tried it before. Believing their situation is a special case.
A talk that never names the objection reads as either naive or evasive. One that names it early, and takes it seriously rather than dismissing it, gets a hearing from the people who were resisting.
The best question for this is asked of the organiser: what would make this session a failure? People answer it honestly because it is what they are actually worried about, and it is covered along with the rest in audience analysis.
When the room is mixed
Common, and the usual response is wrong.
The instinct is to pitch at the average, which produces a talk that is slightly too basic for half the room and slightly too advanced for the other half, and properly aimed at nobody.
Better: pick the group you most want to reach and say so in the first minute. "This session is really aimed at people who manage a team rather than a department, so if that is not you, the part that will be most useful is the last ten minutes."
That sounds like it excludes people. It does the opposite. Everyone now knows how to listen, and the people it is aimed at know it was aimed at them.
Where the research comes from
In order of value.
The organiser. One conversation answers most of it and almost nobody asks. They have registration data and they know what they are worried about.
Last year's agenda. What this audience has already been given.
Their trade press, last six months. What is currently on their minds, which is often not what was on their minds when you wrote the talk.
Their professional forums. The most useful and the slowest. This is where you find the language people use for their own problems, which is rarely the language the industry uses in its literature. Using their phrasing is the fastest way to sound like you have been in the room before.
That last one is an afternoon of reading you probably do not have, which is what audience research exists to shorten.
What this is not
It is not adjusting your tone. Tone is what people mean when they say know your audience without meaning anything, and it is the least important part.
It is not telling them what they want to hear. A room that agreed with everything did not need the session. Knowing the audience is how you work out where to disagree with them productively, rather than by accident.
Related: how to tailor a keynote for what to do with the answers, and speaker positioning, which is the same question asked about your whole business rather than one talk.
Questions
What does know your audience actually mean?
Finding out four things: what they already know, what they can act on, why they are in the room, and what they would push back on. Each one changes a specific part of the talk, which is what makes it actionable rather than a sentiment everybody nods at.
How much audience research is enough?
Enough to cut the section they already know and to replace your examples with theirs. That is usually one conversation with the organizer and an hour reading. Past that you get diminishing returns, and the talk itself still has to be good.
What if the audience is mixed?
Write for the group you most want to reach and tell the room you have done it. Naming who a session is aimed at in the first minute is more respectful than pitching at an average that suits nobody, and it lets everyone else decide how to listen.
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.
