Understanding Your Audience

Now that you've broadly determined who your audience is, it's time to better understand the audience and gain insights to better target your health communication.

Key Tips

  • INFLUENCES - People's behaviours & decisions are influenced by many factors. Understanding these can help you create more targeted communication.

  • AMPLIFICATION - Targeting a system in which people function can help to amplify your message to a wider group and not just the individual by enabling sharing of your communication.

  • PLAN - Impacting a system with your health communication is achieved with a planned social marketing and communications approach. Check out our section on planning health communications for more information on planning.

  • SHARABLE - Regard all your audience members as 'influencers' and create content that enables information to be easily shared with their network/system.

  • TARGETED - One-size-fits-all communication is rarely effective, so narrowing your audience to be more targeted is an important step.


What are Audience Influences?

In order to communicate with a wider audience, healthcare professionals need to tap into what motivates certain groups and learn what their values are, who they trust and why.


Likewise, to understand health behaviours, you need to be aware of people's limiting factors, such as access to resources and services.


Understanding factors such as these will help create targeted communication that is more likely to resonate with your audience. If the message doesn't resonate with the audience or they don't see you as an authoritative voice, they can turn to other sources of information as there are plenty available.



Personal Systems

People are affected by a variety of influences throughout the course of their daily lives, from family and friends, to their cultural and geographical setting, marketing exposure, and social media influencers.


These are illustrated in the following figure.

Take, for example, the decision of choosing what to have for lunch. Someone’s food choice could potentially be influenced by:


  • Micro system: A person will often change what they eat depending on who they are with and match the type of food that others are having.


  • Meso system: Making your own lunch at home versus buying lunch will often impact the type of food that one has. Some external settings might also influence the over consumption of energy-dense nutrient-poor (EDNP) food and drinks, such as going to the pub or a fast food outlet.


  • Exo system: Advertising and sales promotions, as well as images of food that we may see through marketing or social media, will impact our desires for certain types of foods.


  • Macro system: Different cultures place different emphasis on meal times and the types of foods that are considered as a part of these meals.

Why is the System Important?


By identifying the personal systems of your target audience, you have the potential to better understand their influences which can enable you to produce more effective health communication.


For example, if you know the local area of your audience have no or few health food shops, point them towards ordering health related products online or facilitate them to make product requests to their local supermarket.


Likewise, if your audience tends to live on tight daily budgets, encouraging expensive 'super foods' is not practical or achievable. Instead focus on what is accessible to them, like fresh vegetables.


As a health professional, you are already a part of one of your clients’ systems and one of the influential voices nudging them towards positive decisions about their health.


Remember that one-size-fits-all messages rarely work for everyone, so understanding your audience is essential when communicating, and their personal systems are a part of building that understanding.

Amplify Your Impact


As well as understanding your audience, you can also leverage their systems to broaden the reach of your health communication.


Consideration of the broader system gives you the potential to amplify your impact.


Remember that individuals are influencers as well, no matter how small or large their network. This includes your clients or audience members, not just celebrities and social media influencers.


Create content that enables information to be shared across networks, e.g. shared from your website onto Facebook, and encouraging/incentivising family sign ups to your e-news or social media platforms may provide an opportunity to give information to a group rather than an individual.


Check out our tips on communicating through social media.

To help with your planning, here is a printable quick reference guide of the information on this page.

Where to next? - Segmenting Your Audience or back to Choosing Your Audience or to helpful resources linked below

Links & Resources

Publications

Articles published in the journal Nutrients in 2020