“Everyone” isn’t an audience: How to figure out who you need to reach and what matters to them.

When I lead audience workshops and marketing objective meetings, narrowing down the audience is always the most challenging part. “Who are you trying to reach?” sounds like a simple question, but the answer is often “Everyone.”

I understand why. When you believe in what you offer, you can see all kinds of people benefiting from it. But knowing who could do business with you isn’t the same as knowing who your marketing needs to reach. That depends on what you’re trying to accomplish and whose actions or decisions will help you get there.

Think about all the reasons an organization needs to communicate with people. A business wants to attract customers. A college wants to recruit students. A nonprofit wants to encourage donations or volunteer participation. A government agency needs residents to understand a new program or access a service. Those are different objectives, but they all have something in common. There’s a person on the receiving end of the message, and we want that person to understand, believe, feel, or do something.

Narrowing down who you need to reach is only the first step. You also need to understand what matters to them. The challenge is that we know our own businesses so well, it’s easy to forget that the people we’re talking to don’t share our knowledge, priorities, or enthusiasm for every little detail.

Picture a sewer service company whose website is full of photos of clogged sewer pipes. To the people who clear those pipes for a living, the photos say a lot. But sewer pipes are underground. Homeowners never see them. What they see is a basement drain backing up or a toilet that gurgles every time the washing machine runs. Who the heck knows what a clogged pipe out of context even looks like? The things we’re most excited to explain are often the very things our audience cares about least.

I have a rather delicious example of this, but we’ll get to that in a bit. First, let’s talk about what it takes to really understand the people you’re trying to reach.

Let’s say I ask you to buy a birthday present for a 45-year-old woman who lives in the Midwest, has two children, owns a home, and earns $100,000 a year. What would you buy her?

You know quite a bit about her, at least on paper. You know her age, where she lives, her family situation, and her income. But none of that tells you what she’d actually like for her birthday.

Maybe she’s an avid gardener who would love a new set of tools. Maybe she’s training for a marathon, collects vintage pottery, or would give just about anything for an afternoon when nobody needs her to do anything. Until you know her interests, priorities, and personality, you’re guessing.

We do this with our audiences all the time. A college identifies its audience as high school students between 16 and 18. A manufacturer targets plant managers at companies with 50 to 200 employees. A nonprofit focuses on adults in a particular income bracket.

That’s a starting point. Demographics help us identify groups of people, but they don’t tell us nearly enough about what those people care about.

Two high school seniors who look identical on paper can have very different concerns about college. One is excited about leaving home and meeting new people. The other is worried about affordability or keeping up academically.

If a college talks to both of them about its beautiful campus and impressive facilities, it’s missing what matters most to either one. Those shared demographic details don’t explain what either student needs to hear.

Once you’ve identified the people you’re trying to reach, start thinking about what life looks like from their side of the conversation. What are they trying to accomplish? What frustrates them? What are they worried about? What would make their lives easier? And what are they afraid will happen if they make the wrong decision?

These are what marketers call pain points, and they’re incredibly important to understand. People are often more motivated to avoid something painful than to gain something pleasant. There’s a big difference between thinking it would be nice to improve a process and being so frustrated with that process that you dread dealing with it every morning.

Consider a farmer whose equipment is giving them trouble during planting season. They’re dealing with a narrow window of time, unpredictable weather, and the possibility that one breakdown affects their entire season. They aren’t simply shopping for a better piece of equipment. They want to know they can get their crops in the ground when they need to.

Or think about someone contacting a government agency because they can’t figure out which permit they need. They’re already frustrated by confusing instructions, unfamiliar terminology, and the fear of making a mistake that delays their project.

When we understand those frustrations, worries, and motivations, we can communicate in a way that acknowledges what people are actually experiencing. That doesn’t mean frightening people or exaggerating their problems. It means recognizing that there’s a human being on the other end of the conversation, and that person has things on their mind that are very different from what’s on ours.

Most organizations have more than one group of people they need to communicate with, and those groups don’t care about the same things. A nonprofit needs to reach donors, volunteers, community partners, and the people who use its services. A donor wants to know what difference their contribution will make. A volunteer is looking for meaningful work. Someone who needs assistance simply wants to know whether the organization can help them and how to get started. They’re all important audiences, but they need different information.

And the person reading your content often isn’t the person who makes the final decision. The one doing the research might be a parent, a spouse, an assistant, a consultant, or the household’s resident superconsumer, the person everyone else relies on to figure out what to buy. In many cases, the person who will use a product isn’t the one buying it.

Think about college recruitment. The student is the primary audience, but parents, teachers, counselors, coaches, and friends all influence the decision. They have their own questions and concerns, and some of them need information the student hasn’t even thought to ask about.

That doesn’t mean creating a completely different campaign for everyone who has an opinion. But it does mean understanding who matters to the decision and what each person needs from us.

I like to think about audiences as a bullseye. At the center are people who need what we offer right now. The next ring includes people who will need it soon. Farther out are people who could be interested someday but are happy with their current situation. And at the outer edge are people who aren’t thinking about making a change at all. Every one of those people could be a great fit for your organization, but they’re not all ready for the same conversation.

Let’s say your business sells manufacturing equipment. Someone whose equipment just failed needs a replacement immediately. They want to know what you have available, how quickly they can get it, and whether they can depend on it.

Someone planning an upgrade six months from now is comparing options, reviewing costs, and figuring out what will work best for their operation. They’re interested, but they’re not ready to place an order.

And someone who just purchased new equipment isn’t interested in buying more. But they’ll appreciate information about maintenance, efficiency, or getting the most out of what they already own. Same general audience. Very different needs.

People don’t move toward the center of that bullseye at a predictable pace, either. Equipment fails, budgets change, funding becomes available, and life happens. Someone who wasn’t interested yesterday can suddenly have a very good reason to pay attention today. Timing plays a part, too. Information a producer would appreciate during winter planning is easy to overlook during planting or harvest.

This matters because we tend to communicate as though everyone is ready to do what we want them to do right now. Buy the product. Schedule the appointment. Apply to the program. Make the donation. But sometimes the most useful thing we can do is answer a question, help someone understand their options, or give them a reason to remember us when the time is right.

I’m a baker. I love baking cakes, and I know more about buttercream than any reasonable person needs to know.

There are seven standard types of buttercream, and I’ve made all of them. A few years ago, I even conducted my own little experiment. Every week, we tried a cake or cupcake with a different type of buttercream so I could compare them.

I can tell you about the differences between meringue-based and custard-based buttercreams. We can talk about egg whites, heating sugar, texture, stability, and why I prefer Swiss buttercream when I’m piping frosting onto baked goods.

But if you order a piece of cake at a restaurant, you don’t care about any of that. You want a piece of cake that’s delicious, looks beautiful, and has frosting that complements the cake itself. You don’t want to sit through a 20-minute lecture on buttercream before the server brings you dessert. People who know me have heard me say it often: people just want the cake.

And yet, we do this to people in our business communications all the time. We’re proud of what we make and sell. We know how much thought, work, and expertise goes into creating our products or delivering our services. And because we find those details fascinating, we assume everyone else will, too.

When we’re talking with someone face-to-face, we can usually tell when we’ve lost them. Their eyes glaze over. They stop asking questions. They start looking around the room for someone to rescue them.

But when we’re writing website content, creating brochures, developing presentations, or putting together marketing materials, we don’t get that immediate feedback. We can go on and on about our processes, technology, history, and expertise without realizing that the person receiving our message just wants to know whether we can help them.

That’s where understanding your audience makes such a difference. If you know why someone is paying attention to you, what they’re trying to accomplish, and what questions they need answered, you can give them the information that matters most right away.

And if they want to learn more? Fantastic! Give them the opportunity to explore. Maybe they really are interested in why Swiss buttercream is such a good choice for piped decorations.

There’s nothing wrong with sharing your expertise. Making that knowledge available is a great way to build trust and show that you know what you’re doing. Just don’t make people slog through the buttercream lecture to get their cake.

I sometimes get pushback on this. People tell me, “But it’s different in my industry. We’re highly technical. Facts are important in our field. Our decision makers base their decisions on rational factors.”

Hmmm…no. People are people, and we are all emotional creatures. What sparks that emotion varies from one audience to the next, but if we’ve done our job getting to know our audience, we understand what matters to them, what language they speak, and what they need from us. Facts absolutely matter, especially with technical audiences. But first, you have to give people a reason to care enough to explore those facts.

If your audience is all engineers, you’d better know enough about engineering to hold up your end of the conversation. But speaking their language only gets you so far. They want to know what results you can deliver, how your process works, and what it means for their work, their team, and the problems they’re trying to solve. And they need to trust that you can do what you say you can. Technical expertise helps you earn that trust, but rattling off specifications won’t do all the work for you.

There’s a question I think every business or organizational leader should ask occasionally: Do we actually know what matters to the people we serve, or do we just think we know? It’s surprisingly easy to make assumptions, especially when we’ve been working in the same industry for years. Getting to know your audience isn’t something you do once and check off your list. People’s needs, preferences, and expectations change, sometimes much faster than the businesses serving them realize.

Look at what happened in the bridal jewelry industry. Over the last few years, big diamonds on skinny bands took over. Lab-created diamonds made it possible to buy a beautiful stone with terrific color and clarity for a fraction of the price of a mined diamond, and suddenly 2-carat rings that used to be out of reach were all over Instagram, Reddit, Facebook, and TikTok. In 2019, about 12% of engagement rings featured a lab-grown diamond. By 2025, it was 61%, according to The Knot’s Real Weddings Study.

Most jewelers are not 20-something women. The jewelers who were paying attention to those conversations started carrying larger lab diamonds. The ones who weren’t fell behind and lost sales to online retailers.

You don’t have to predict every change in your audience’s preferences. But you do need to pay attention, and you probably have more opportunities to do that than you realize. Start with the people in your organization who interact with customers, students, residents, or community members every day. Your sales team hears questions and objections. Your customer service team knows what frustrates people. Your front-line employees recognize patterns that never make their way into a management meeting.

And, of course, you can ask the people you’re trying to reach. Talk to existing customers. Ask why they chose you, what they were concerned about before making a decision, and what they wish they’d known sooner. Pay attention to the questions people ask, the things they complain about, and the reasons they decide not to move forward.

You can learn from what people do, too. Look at the questions they’re asking online, the topics they’re discussing, the information they’re searching for, and the ways they’re interacting with your communications.

The goal isn’t to collect a mountain of data. It’s to develop a better understanding of the people whose decisions and actions matter to your organization.

Here are a few questions worth discussing with your team. If you want to go a step further, my 30-minute audience worksheet [link] walks you through them, with room to note what you know, what you’re assuming, and what you still need to find out.

• Who are the different groups of people we need to communicate with?
• What problems, frustrations, or worries bring them to us?
• Who else influences their decisions?
• Are we answering their questions, or mostly talking about what we want them to know?
• How do we know our assumptions about our audience are accurate?

You don’t need perfect answers to every question before you can communicate effectively. But asking them reveals the gaps between what your organization thinks people need and what they actually need.

Understanding your audience changes what you say, how you say it, where you share it, and what you ask people to do next. Maybe your advertising emphasizes innovation when customers are more concerned about reliability. Maybe your nonprofit explains everything it does without clearly showing donors the difference their support makes. Or maybe you’ve created a perfectly good message, but you’re sharing it in places where the people you want to reach aren’t paying attention.

Those aren’t always problems with your writing, design, or advertising. Sometimes they’re signs that you need a better understanding of the people you’re trying to communicate with.

The next time you’re reviewing a piece of communication from your organization, look at it through the eyes of the person receiving it. Not everyone. That person. What are they hoping to find? What do they already know? What questions are they trying to answer? And most importantly, are you giving them what they came for, or making them sit through the buttercream lecture first?

Ready to go beyond “everyone”?

Download Jen’s 30-minute audience worksheet here.

Jen Watson is a marketing strategist, storyteller, and founder of Jen Watson Consulting, with more than 24 years of experience in marketing, sales, and business development. She helps businesses identify and understand their target audiences, develop effective marketing strategies, and create messaging that connects with the right people. Combining strategic thinking with a passion for storytelling, Jen simplifies complex ideas and develops campaigns that build trust, evoke emotion, and inspire action.