Know your audience. Why did I chose this topic? Perhaps, as a Strategic Communications major, I wanted to convey that the effective communicator is the one who clearly understands his/her target audience and is able to establish effective ways of communicating the message to that audience.
Imagine a farmer, who’s goal is to produce enough harvest to feed the entire community. Aside the fact that he needs to be the expert in wheat, he also need to know the environment. He needs to understand the type of soil, the climate, and the risk of bad weather. Perhaps he may want to know how much land he needs, what equipment to use and when to start the process to produce enough harvest.
Just like the farmer, we, as effective communicators, must understand the tools we are using and know how to apply them to effectively deliver the message to the audience. Whether we are selling a product or offering a service, effectiveness reveals when we appeal to the audience, when the audience is able to draw associations with our message. We need to know what our audience likes and does not like, we need to understand it’s demographics, interests and many other key features that define it.
Well… Where do we begin? I believe, the process of effective communication begins from clearly defining the purpose of the message. Why does it matter? Why does the farmer want to feed the community? Why farmer’s made a choice to grow wheat and not something else?
Once we establish “why” we need to think “how.” What equipment should farmer utilize. What would be the frequency and the amount of water to use on the field. What channels are we going to utilize to deliver the message most effectively. Television. Internet. Newspaper. Social Media. Knowing through what media channel audience responds the best is a key to establishing a communications channel. Knowing the audience will help us define the ways of the message delivery.
Finally it is the harvest time. Farmer collects the wheat from the field and takes it to the mill. After doing our homework on the message delivery and successfully deploying our marketing campaign, we have to measure our effectiveness of the message delivery. We need to measure the levels of success, or failure and learn on the experience by collecting feedback from our audience and revising and refining the message.
Truly, without knowing the audience it is difficult to visualize, capture and convey the message effectively. This is where the strategic communications profession comes to play and that is why I chose “Know Your Audience” as the topic for this section of the blog.
References
Daudhy, M. (2016, July 4). This MIT-based startup is hoping to change the Agriculture setup starting with Pakistan. Retrieved from https://www.techjuice.pk/this-mit-based-startup-is-hoping-to-change-the-agriculture-setup-starting-with-pakistan/
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