In public affairs, an audience is a broad, roughly defined group of people based on common characteristics. You may have several different audiences during a single communication effort. For instance, you may identify an internal audience made up of people who are United States military members and Department of Defense civilian employees attached to your base and their immediate families.
Your need to communicate with that internal audience may present at different times than other audiences. In addition, your communication style and vocabulary may differ from your internal audience when compared with others.
Segment Your Audience
Identifying your internal audience is just one example of segmentation. Your broader audience can be segmented and combined into many smaller audiences so you can reasonably and appropriately plan to reach them. As you get to know your audience and begin to analyze them, look for similarities and patterns among them. There are several ways an audience can be segmented. You can start with demographics (personal characteristics such as age, gender, marital status, income, etc.), psychographics (why they are involved) and motivating self interest (what's in it for them).
Ask yourself about:
- Who they are
- Age
- Education
- Income
- Socioeconomic status
- Their knowledge
- What do they know about the issue (or topic)?
- What do they know about you?
- What do they want to know?
- What do they need to know?
- Their attitudes
- How do they feel about the issue (or topic)?
- How do they feel about you?
- How would you like them to feel?
- Their behavior
- What are they doing about the issue?
- What do you want them to do or not do?
Your audience can also be segmented based on factors of human behavior.
- Social
- Public groups
- State institutions
- Local governments
- Civic groups
- Social groups
- Cultural
- Ideology
- Tribalism
- Customs and beliefs
- Ethnicity
- Religion
- Language
- Physical
- Geography
- Environment
- Resources
- Urban/suburban/rural
- Informational
- Channels
- Narratives
- Messages
- Influencers
- Psychological
- Awareness
- Perception
- Reasoning
- Judgment
Stakeholders and Publics
As you continue to analyze and segment your audience, you need to identify two key groups within it that will help you meet specific goals within your communication plan. Those groups are stakeholders and publics. Both are extremely important to your organization and can affect your organizations in powerful ways.
- A stakeholder, as defined by Professor John M. Bryson, is any person, group or organization that can place a claim on your organization’s resources, attention or output, or is affected by its output.
- A public, as defined by the Public Relations Society of America, is any group of people tied together by some common factor or interest you have identified and to whom you can direct communications to effect change. Members may or may not be aware that they are part of such a public.
Your stakeholders obviously have an impact on what you are doing, which has to be taken into consideration, but your objectives, strategies, tactics, themes and messages will all be tailored toward your publics. There is also some overlap in that a stakeholder can also be part of a public that you have identified.
Once you have segmented your audience to generally identify stakeholders and publics, you are ready to conduct stakeholder analysis and publics analysis to further refine the groups and plan your resulting communication strategies and tactics.
References
Bryson, J. M. (1995). Strategic planning for public and nonprofit organizations. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.
PRSA. (2024). Glossary of terms. Public Relations Society of America, Inc.