Understanding Your Audience

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From the course by Northwestern University

Content Strategy for Professionals: Engaging Audiences

268 ratings

Northwestern University

Content Strategy for Professionals: Engaging Audiences

268 ratings

Course 1 of 5 in the Specialization Content Strategy for Professionals

In this course, professionals at all levels of an organization will learn the best ways to engage an audience they want and need by smartly implementing their important, strategic stories and information and by using proven tools and techniques to enhance an audience’s experiences and interest. Content Strategy is a conversation that provides thought-leadership. It starts a “conversation” with users and stakeholders inside and outside an organization. Conversations are the natural way people think about complex issues. Conversations also enable people to develop “stories,” which lead to understanding and helpful mental pictures. Content Strategy practitioners are at all levels of the best enterprises – in all departments and sectors from the top leader to the newcomer in the ranks. In this complex information age, forward-thinking employees know that if they and their organizations are to thrive, they need to go beyond their job descriptions. They must master the most demanding communications frontier – creating engaging, strategic, honest stories and information that is valued by their most important audiences. In turn that will make their enterprise stand out. Regardless of their area of work, position or expertise, Content Strategy practitioners know how to use words, pictures, video, and social and mobile media to interact with their most important constituents with trustable, actionable information that the audience values and will use. The strategic content they produce enhances the user’s lives and deepens their understanding and engagement with the organization. Guest lecturers in this course include: -- Rachel Davis Mersey, Associate Professor, Medill, Northwestern -- Ed Malthouse, Theodore R. and Annie Laurie Sills Professor of Integrated Marketing Communications, Medill, Northwestern -- Bobby Calder, Charles H. Kellstadt Professor of Marketing & Director of the Center for Cultural Marketing, Kellogg, Northwestern -- Steven Duke, Associate Professor, Medill, Northwestern -- Janice Castro, Assistant Professor Emerita, Medill, Nothwestern

From the lesson

Audiences and Brand

Module 2 emphasizes why understanding your audience and being able to effectively segment them is crucial to getting your message across. It also addresses how to craft a core creative concept for a content brand.

Understanding Your Audience4:36

Creating Personas3:52

Segmenting Your Audience4:14

Targeting an Audience with Experiences3:26

Meet the Instructors

John Lavine
Founder, Professor and Director, Media Management Center
Candy Lee
Professor
Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications

[MUSIC]

Welcome to week two of our MOOC.

Let's begin by quickly reviewing the three truths we discussed in week one.

There's the ever rising tidal wave of information.

Remember the 16 million coffee cups in 2011 had grown to 152 million in 2013?

Number two, that people don't have one more minute in their day,

which means that the competition for that precious commodity, their time,

is ferocious, and it's getting worse as each day passes.

And number three, that the world is getting ever more complicated.

But if you give people engaging content

that enables them to make better decisions and improve their lives,

at work and at home, they'll consider giving you their time.

To win in this environment, organizations must determine the few prioritized

messages that are key to fostering their strategic movement forward.

Taking up people's time with non-strategic content is not only wasteful,

it teaches the important audiences that you want to reach to pay no attention

to everything you say.

Now we're gonna meet Professor Rachel Davis Mersey.

She specializes in understanding audiences here at the Medill School at Northwestern,

and her research contradicts two things

that professionals who try to communicate have traditionally believed.

The first is that their job is to tell the audience

what the organization wants them to know.

Rachel says her research shows that's wrong.

So welcome, Rachel, and why is that wrong?

>> What we know is that people will only learn about things that they're motivated

to learn about.

That is to say, people will accept what they

need to know from an organization that delivers what they want to know.

Think about your favorite newspaper or magazine.

You're more willing to read about topics that may not be of particular

interest to you because it's in a source that understands who you are and

serves your needs.

>> And so, let's go on, then, to the second one.

You compounded blowing up the first by saying

there really are no more mass audiences.

For most people in organizations,

they want everybody inside or everybody outside to take in their message.

They can't?

Why can't they?

>> I think you're exactly right to say there are no more mass audiences.

That's something organizations have to accept from the beginning.

The organizations we see being particularly successful at reaching mass

audiences are doing it because they aggregate a number of targeted audiences.

So think about something as ubiquitous as Facebook.

Facebook has a large mass audience, if you will,

because it serves a number of different smaller audiences with a variety of needs.

High schoolers are on there for a very different reason, John,

than you and I are on there.

And ultimately Facebook's success in the marketplace is being able to

aggregate all those targets into one product.

And that's really where organizations need to be focusing if they want scale.

>> So, okay, I see the two points you're making.

And if I'm listening to this MOOC, I'm gonna say,

so what's the science behind that?

Give me some underpinning so that I can really buy into those results?

>> There really is science behind this.

People's emotional and cognitive limitations are real.

They can only attend to a certain number of topics deeply at one time.

So people only pay attention to topics when they're motivated to do so.

And there are things that precede motivation.

And that's what's most important to organizations,

the idea that self-interest and social identification precede motivation.

So organizations have to understand their audience's social identifications and

self-interest needs so they can craft messages that serve them where they are.

>> Okay, so let me just back up for a second.

I wanna ask a sort of two part question.

You're saying I'm in an organization, you're the organization and you want to

reach me with something, but you have to target me, and you have to understand

what I'm interested in before we get to what the organization's interested in.

Is that the- >> Not only do I have to understand you

and what your interested in, I have to understand you, your lifestyle,

your needs and behavior so

well, that I can predict what you need even if you don't know you need it.

One of the biggest mistakes organizations make is asking someone, what do you need?

No one knew they needed an iPhone until iPhones were invented.

Organizations that are most successful are gonna get ahead of that curve by

understanding people's lifestyles, behaviors, attitudes, and

crafting our messages to serve them where they are and

advance their lifestyle in some significant way.

>> So it's kind of a one-two punch.

First, you gotta give me something that you just know I want because,

like my favorite newspaper or

magazine or TV show, I'm gonna come there cuz I know I'm gonna get it.

That's number one?

>> Absolutely.

And then, you're gonna anticipate a need cuz you know so

much about me and you're gonna meet that need.

>> Exactly.

And it may not be the message that I thought my organization initially

wanted to deliver.

It becomes something of a blend, where the organization is serving its needs by

understanding the audience better.

[MUSIC]

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