5.5: Using Your Audience Analysis
Angela Pettitt
Learning Objectives
- Understand how you can use your audience analysis when you prepare a speech.
- Recognize how your audience analysis can help you alter your speech while speaking.
A good audience analysis takes time, thought, preparation, implementation, and processing. If done well, it will yield information that will help you interact effectively with your audience. Professional speakers, corporate executives, sales associates, and entertainers all rely on audience analysis to connect with their listeners. So do political candidates, whose chances of gaining votes depend on crafting a message and mood to appeal to each specific audience. One audience might be preoccupied with jobs, another with property taxes, and another with crime. Similarly, your audience analysis should help you identify the interests of your audience.
Ultimately, a successful audience analysis can guide you in preparing the basic content of your speech and help you adjust your speech “on the fly.”
Prepare Content with Your Audience in Mind
The first thing a good audience analysis can do is help you focus your content for your specific audience. If you are planning to deliver a persuasive speech on why people should become vegans and you find out through analysis that half of your audience is daughters and sons of cattle ranchers, you need to carefully think through your approach to the content. Maybe you’ll need to tweak your topic to focus on just the benefits of veganism without trying to persuade the audience explicitly. While there will always be some naysayers in any audience, if you think through your topic with your audience in mind, you may be able to find a topic that will be both interesting to you as a speaker and beneficial to your audience as well.
In addition to adjusting the topic of your speech prior to the speaking event, you can also use your audience analysis to help ensure that the content of your speech will be clear and understandable.
Adjusting Your Speech Based on Your Analysis
A particularly savvy speaker can also use audience analysis to make adjustments during the actual speech. These adjustments can pertain to the audience and to the physical setting.
The feedback you receive from your audience during your speech is a valuable indication of ways to adjust your presentation. If you’re speaking after lunch and use direct observation to notice audience members looking drowsy, you can make adjustments to liven up the tone of your speech. You could use humor or raise your voice slightly. You could pose some questions and ask for a show of hands to get your listeners actively involved. In another example, you may notice from frowns and headshaking that some listeners aren’t convinced by the arguments you are presenting. In this case, you could spend more time on a specific area of your speech and provide more evidence than you originally intended. Good speakers can learn a lot by watching their audience while speaking and then make specific adjustments to both the content and delivery to enhance the ultimate impact.
AI Insight
Before you present, have AI generate “if/then” micro-prompts (e.g., If heads are down after lunch, insert a 20-second audience poll; if puzzled faces appear at term X, swap in a plain-language definition)
The second kind of adjustment has to do with the physical setting for your speech. For example, your situational analysis may reveal that you’ll be speaking in a large auditorium when you had expected a nice, cozy conference room. If you’ve created visual aids for a small, intimate environment, you may have to omit them or tell your listeners that they can view it after the presentation. You may also need to account for a microphone. If you’re lucky enough to have a cordless microphone, you will have more freedom of movement than if the microphone is corded or attached to a podium.
Beyond the Podium Insight
Real speakers adapt in real time. Eye contact, facial cues, and questions are data. Treat delivery as a feedback loop–observe, adjust, and re-check understanding.
One time, a student who anticipated presenting in a large room had planned to use a 100-foot tape measure to illustrate the nation’ wealth gap.
However, when she arrived, she found that the room was only 12×20 feet and therefore had to adjust her plans to walk back and forth across the room several times.
Small detail can therefore profoundly affect how you plan to deliver your presentation.
