The Birthday Party Test: How To Narrow Your Audience
Dripping your message into too big of a pool is a sure way to dilute it to homeopathy levels . . . which we all know doesn’t work.
Imagine, for a moment, that you’re in middle school. (No, no. Stop screaming. You aren’t really there. This is a hypothetical). The spring formal is approaching and if you don’t have a date, you will literally die ohmygod. Your goal is “find someone to go to the dance with me”. You can’t just walk into the cafeteria and scream “SOMEONE GO TO THE DANCE WITH ME”. (I mean, you can, but…) You need to be tactical. You need to have a specific audience in mind.
A poorly defined audience (or one that is overly broad) is the root cause of the vast majority of issues I run into when I’m working with someone on their science outreach. From “I don’t know where to start” to “I can’t get anyone to listen/subscribe/come to my talk/donate,” my first question is always going to be “who is your audience?”. My next question is going to be “okay, now can you narrow that down”?.
The temptation is always going to be to have the broadest audience possible. If you aren’t appealing to EVERYONE you might miss out on potential opportunities! You could turn away a potential audience! You could miss out on donations or potential converts to your organization or the chance to be the most beloved communicator ever!
But here’s the thing — you miss out on way more potential audience connections by trying to please everyone.
Fortunately, there’s a quick-and-easy test to help you narrow down your audience to one that even Goldilocks would agree is just the right size.
Read the rest of the article over on Southern Fried Science.
