Your target audience might (and should) come up already during the setting of your objectives. Yet, it is helpful and often necessary to get into a bit more detail: Who do I want to talk to? And where can I reach them?
Your counter or alternative narrative campaign should be designed for your target audience – so always (!) keep the people in mind you actually want to address. Even the best planned and most creative campaigns can fail, simply because it talks past its intended audience. Thus, your target audience is the starting point when choosing the tone of your messages and possible messengers, as well as the platform you are using to share your content.
Be specific
Of course, your campaign can aim at reaching a broader audience. But experts recommend to not be too ambitious, suggesting to be as specific as possible when defining your audience. The various social media platforms allow you to select criteria and identify key characteristics of your audience when planning advertised campaigns, making sure that your content is actually shown to the people you intend to reach.
In the respective advertisement tools, you can specify basic factors such as age, location, language and gender, but also include interests, political affiliations, movies, music and, according to a 2013 study by Cambridge University and Microsoft, even a preference for curly fries as it might indicate the IQ of your audience.
Even if you are not planning to use advertised campaigns, it is useful to write down the characteristics: Create personas with needs and behaviours to help you define your audience.
If possible: Talk to members of your target audience – this can give you better understanding about them and how to reach them, but it might also allow you to include them in the content development process.
Important note: If you want to reach different audiences on different or even the same platforms, do not just rely on the same key message for everyone. Adjust your tone and content to the respective audiences (and also platforms as they all have different specifications - you could consult our section on formats).
After specifying your target audience, you should already have a general idea of which platform might be the one to actually reach your audience. Careful though: platform selection is an important step and highly dependent on national contexts, professional group and age.
Here is a great example of audience selection: The campaign #ichbinkeinvirus from Germany, provides a platform for victims of anti-asian racism
For this year's International Day against Homophobia, Transphobia and Biphobia, the 17th of May you are planning a campaign. Your aim is to shed light on the fact that there are still many countries in the world, where the law forbids same sex relationships. Who could be your main audience?
Be specific
Here is a great example of audience selection: The campaign #ichbinkeinvirus from Germany, provides a platform for victims of anti-asian racism
Exercise