The Power and Importance of Context: Relate to Your Audience and See the Results 

Communication does not happen in a vacuum. As a leader, the messages you put out into the world are interpreted through the lens of your audience’s beliefs, assumptions, and experiences. Without considering context, your communications will likely miss their mark. 

When launching the iPod in 2001, Jobs intuitively understood the context of the market – people wanted stylish, simple devices for portable music. While other MP3 players focused on technical specs, Jobs storyboarded an experience. He focused on who would be receiving and using what he put out into the world. Therefore, the experience centered around album artwork, playlists, and one-click downloads that resonated with young music lovers – not highly technical menus that the average person didn’t care about. Jobs understood the context around why someone would be listening to music and how they would want to listen to their music. 

This is one of many examples of why understanding context is critical for effective communicators. Whether you’re in a meeting at work, explaining something to your friend that lives in another country, or learning a new language, context is everywhere. Without it, things take longer to understand or completely miss the mark. It helps explain the “why” behind the “what”. It helps frame a situation and add more color to it from the eyes of the listener. It helps our brains connect the dots of the conversation and create connection with what we’re hearing or seeing. It spurs that “aha” moment when everything you’re listening to or seeing starts to click.

Your audience shouldn’t have to work that hard to interpret what you’re trying to convey to them. Talk to them, not at them.

Through all the different ways to communicate, you can create relatability with what matters most to your audience, customer, or community. This is not groundbreaking stuff, but it’s useful. Those who follow it succeed, those who don’t constantly wonder why people don’t buy from them. 

We’ll explore why getting to know who you’re talking to is key no matter what you’re doing or what you’re building. Let’s dive in to cover what context means in the following 5 areas:

• Know Your Audience
• Develop Avatars
• Lead With Stories
• Check For Understanding
• Monitor & Measure 

Importance of Knowing Your Audience

The more you know, the better you can serve your audience, customer, or community. Get to know who they are, what bothers them the most, and why their problem remains unsolved. This helps you do a couple of things:

• Helps you tailor your messaging in a way that is going to land
• Develop relationships with your audience, customer, or community in ways that will benefit them and your brand

According to a study published in MIT Sloan Management Review, “When content is customized to match the precise needs, interests and level of sophistication of the audience, it gets more traction.” (I can relate, can you?) 

If you don’t know your audience, how do you know what will unify them and connect them to what you’re saying? 

Take time to survey and interview core audiences, customers, and community members across demographics to understand what is important to them so you can use the right context in communications. Answer questions like:

• What matters to them?
• What motivates purchases or participation?
• What barriers do they face?
• What solutions have they tried before? 
• How can you connect with them on a deeper level? 

These insights should inform how you communicate and connect moving forward. Be open to learning and adjusting along the way. We’re all human. 

Deepen Your Connection by Developing Avatars

First, if you don’t know what this means, don’t worry. This is essentially a detailed profile that brings your ideal audience, customer, or community to life within your brand or organization. When things get busy or big, those personal details can get a little lost, and it’s easy to forget who we are serving and creating for (just me? okay vulnerable moment, I digress). It brings generalized information to life through context (heyyo, I couldn’t resist) like names, demographics, quotes, and even hobbies.

You’ve probably heard this fancy language mostly used by marketing teams to understand their customers, but I think this can also be used in many different ways. If you’re about to give a speech and you need to understand your audience and make sure the message lands, this could be a great exercise for you. If you’re building a community around a specific need, this is a great way to keep that need in front of you every day to drive the purpose behind what you’re building. 

There are a lot of ways to do this, but below is one example of what it could look like to develop one of these:

Here are examples of what you may find yourself or your team asking:

• What keeps Amanda the Working Mom up at night? (alright, besides her newborn, you know what I mean)
• What excites or concerns Pedro the Recently Graduated Professional?
• What allows Sarah the CEO to deliver a tough message to the board and brand partners?

Referencing these personas keeps the person you’re talking with relevant in the development of every communication before it even reaches them. It increases empathy and impact throughout development, not just when it reaches them. 

Bring Context to Life Through Stories

I love a good tale and always have. From bedtime tales when I was little to, honestly, I guess sometimes I still read before bed. Why is that a thing?

Narratives allow audiences to easily follow what you’re saying and create connection (underline, bold, caps that last word). Steve Jobs is a great example of leveraging storytelling in business. Take a look at Apple’s marketing – it’s centered around narratives and the people that create them. Doesn’t it make you want to go experience life (alright don’t leave me hanging here!)

Or you know when you’re at dinner with friends you haven’t talked to in awhile? You ask how they are and what they’ve been up to, and the stories start to flow. Notice how captivated you are by their trip to the Maldives and what they found on their scuba excursion. Do you remember why what they found changed their life? I hope you do for the sake of this example, but the point here is this: sharing a narrative creates connections that your brain can more easily access. 

These narratives invite the audience into a shared experience, allowing them to walk in the shoes of the characters and connect emotionally. Keeping the human experience at the center will increase empathy and impact (just like in our earlier point). 

Importance of Cultural Context 

It would be a miss for me to talk about storytelling without talking about cultural context even for a moment. Remember that context takes into consideration the values, norms, customs, ideas, and behaviors within a culture.  It’s important to bring people along for the journey in a way that resonates with them. While there’s many different types of context, we’ll focus on cultural here.

I have long conversations with my friends who live in Australia, Germany, Brazil, and other places around the world about their customs, social gestures, and everything in between. (I’m still learning the difference between a jumper and a sweater). This is a light hearted example, but you see where I’m going.

When you’re developing and delivering communications, you must consider the norms of your audience, customer, or community member. The message needs to land with who you’re talking to and their culture, not you and your culture. That’s why global brands have more at stake with their messaging than local brands, or the language a seasoned, global speaker will use is different than that of a local comedian. 

Communicate Better Through Data

Data is the holy grail of the modern business world. It doesn’t have to be boring – it can actually provide a great deal of credibility to your message. It also helps keep you on track to using information that is measurable and relevant.

Now, the type of information you use depends on your audience. For engineers, using specific metrics will be great. For brand marketers, they may need something more artistic. 90% of the information transmitted to the brain is visual, so let the creative juices flow. 

The point is this – make your information make sense to your audience as fast as possible. Don’t make them work hard to understand it, or you’ll lose them.

Standalone statistics rarely compel (typical) audiences on their own. To generate interest and drive change, turn your information into a dynamic visual. To illustrate the simplicity of what this could look like, take this fry ratio of a potato for example. While silly, it gets the point across that sometimes simple visuals tell the narrative instead of explaining the numbers and calculations behind this ratio.

This is why it’s important to understand who you’re talking to and know what message is going to land with them. Steve Jobs didn’t sell the iPod on highly technical details – he sold it on experiences we could have by using the product.

Check For Understanding

Depending on the size of your audience and if you’re communicating live or through brand messages, checking for understanding will vary. If you’re communicating live, you can poll the audience, share quick and simple summaries, or if the group is small enough, ask for someone to repeat the highlights to you. You might be laughing and thinking “that’s so simplistic”. It is, but you’d be surprised how often it doesn’t happen. 

Metrics and ratings might be your only source of checking to see if your audience grasped what you wanted them to grasp. Testing in small groups before big launches helps get early and quick feedback, or having a few key customers that are influencers or brand ambassadors. There’s a whole host of things you can do here that I won’t bore you with, but the key is this: how are you checking to see if what you said landed with who you’re talking to? 

If you’re not checking, you may want to start. If your method isn’t working, dare to try new things. 

Monitor & Measure

“What cannot be measured, cannot be improved.” per William Thompson, a notable physicist. Hopefully you’ve heard this before, but if you haven’t, you’re welcome. 

This can be the fun part! Testing and learning new ways to share your message by doing all of the things we’ve talked about so far. Sharing the context (or the ‘why’ or the ‘background’ etc.) for that project with your team, relating to your audience in a shared experience, or sharing research with a customer grounded in a powerful and emotive narrative. The impact of these things can be measured to know if it makes sense for who you’re talking to.

Monitoring how you tweak a variety of components (one at a time, just my suggestion) will show you what works and does not work for your audience, customer, or community. If you don’t do that, then you’ll quickly lose your audience or customer base because no one will resonate with it. 

Quick Recap

We’ve talked about a lot so far. Before we get to some tactical takeaways of where to begin with all of this, let’s quickly review:

• Know Your Audience so you communicate with appropriate context
• Develop Avatars to deepen your connection and make your messaging empathetic and impactful
• Use Stories to illustrate your point to provide more meaning to your audience
• Check for Understanding through polls, surveys, live questions, or recaps
• Monitor and Measure so you know your tried and true methods to connect with your audience

Okay, now to the practical stuff!

Tactical Takeaways  

Let’s go through some tangible steps you can take to start using the information we’ve talked about so far. It can all seem a little fuzzy in theory. Depending on what you’re working on, this may vary, but in general, here are a few things you can do to boost how you communication through sharing relevant context. 

1. Conduct at least 2 audience or customer interviews. Talk to actual and prospective audience members or customers. Ask probing questions to understand their values, hesitations, priorities and aspirations on a deeper level. These will be your insights to crafting your messages.
2. Map 1-2 typical audience members or customers as personas with profiles. Give them names, faces, backgrounds, and motivations. Write down things that keep them up at night, what their hobbies are, and if they have family. A great place to start with this if you don’t have anyone in mind is to start with a friend. Refer back to this often, use it in team meetings, put it as your desktop background. It will help you get into the heads of your audience and customers (or friend) when creating communications. It will remind you what context you need to use. 
3. Rewrite one of your existing messages or communications and think about it through a narrative. Who is the hero (hint: it should be your audience or your customer) and what challenge do they face? What emotion draws people in to connect and relate? 

You have everything you need to take your communications to the next level now. Whether you’re preparing for an internal meeting, creating social media campaigns, or developing a speech for an audience, you have some tips and tactical takeaways. Frame your message for your listener, paint the canvas for them to easy connect with what you’re saying, and experience the fruit of building deeper connections with your community.