#02 New complexities in defining audience: direct vs indirect vs target

It used to be simple. There was your business and there were customers. There was usually a wider audience who may (or may not) be aware of what you did. And there was typically a target sector within that audience (the target audience) which you focused on as likely to become customers. And those customers bought things. With money. And in the vast majority of cases they paid up front.

Nowadays, the picture is more nuanced, with additional layers and subtleties that can easily confuse and confound. The result is less clarity, not more, around what to do, when and where.

Defining the entirety of the audience is the simplest. And though you’ll find various sources defining this slightly differently, it’s broadly the same reasoning that sits behind it, and quite easy to add the specifics of your particular boundaries. Here’s my definition:

Audience: any individual or organisation which comes into contact with your content, product, service or representatives, whether directly, or indirectly through a third party.

That last part is important, and relates to the passing on of messaging or experience by the original receiver. For example, after seeing an advert on YouTube, I tell my partner about it. She’s received some version of the messaging—interpreted through me—even though not directly. Easily overlooked, this is a significant extension to those definitions which cover only what might be described as the direct audience.

Splitting out the differences

So we immediately have two sub-divisions of audience to consider:

Direct audience: those who directly come into contact with your content, product, service, etc.

Indirect audience: those who only have indirect contact with your content, product, service, etc.

And it’s easy to see how an indirect audience can quickly become a direct audience if their subsequent actions bring them into contact with your brand. So my partner might look up that advert I mentioned, or visit the brand website to find out more.

Indirect audiences are particularly important in business-to-business (B2B) situations, because very often the initial researcher for a project or initiative is reporting findings to a wider group of internal stakeholders. And some of those might report back to their teams, some of whom might go home and tell their families about the cool stuff they’re working on.

So we could actually split our indirect audience down into 1st order indirect audience, 2nd order indirect audience, and so on. If we felt that was of value. And it might be.

Why is this important? Because how complex and easy to understand your messaging is—and more vitally, how easy it is to pass on—will heavily influence how effectively it’s transmitted down through these layers. If your position and what you stand for, along with what you’re offering and why you’re the right fit, are not absolutely 100% crystal clear, then the likelihood if it being effectively conveyed to the people who sit beyond your direct audience is substantially reduced.

Think social media, reTweet after reTweet after reTweet. Is your message becoming diluted? Or is it strong and bold and clear enough to withstand such treatment? Content is important, but content without clarity, reach and ‘impact at reach’ is only doing a fraction of the job it could be doing.

Reaching through the layers

Now, digital channels such as social media add another dimension. And the same applies to those company presentations in some circumstances. Both make it relatively easy (not always taken) to show the actual content or message, or pass on a website link. At which point the receiver becomes, or may become, direct audience. A reTweet from a 3rd order indirect audience (who didn’t go back to source but forwarded the website link) might generate you a new direct audience far removed from the original receiving direct audience.

You can see the power of messaging that remains strong enough through the layers to still trigger engagement when it hits a receptive target.

Which leads us nicely onto the target audience, a term that was also once relatively straightforward to define. But there are new complexities here too, and I’ll explore those in another article in the future. For now, here’s my current definition, and you’ll see in that next article why it’s so open-ended.

Target audience: the subset of the audience (whether direct or indirect) that responds to your content, product, service, etc. in a way that leads to the level (or levels) of engagement that have been prioritised.

The key term here is ‘engagement’. And the challenge comes from the myriad ways in which individuals or organisations can now interact with us, thanks largely to the ease of information download and transmission via the internet. And exploring the implications of that is best left for next time.