The 4 Types of Audience for your Speech

When you are thinking about delivering a speech, one of the most important questions is "Who are my audience?"

This video is about 4 different types of audience that you can face as a speaker and how to adjust your objectives and manner of engagement to each of these distinct audience groups.

The 4 Types of Audience

There are four types of audience, and consequent persuasive strategy that you can come upon when you are seeking to move a group to action through your speech.

1. Friendly. Your purpose: reinforcing their beliefs and sense of shared interests.
2. Apathetic. Your purpose is to first convince them that it matters for them.
3. Uninformed. Your requirement is to educate before you can begin to propose a course of action.
4. Hostile. You purpose is to respect them and their viewpoint. The most you may be able to gain is their respect and an openness to listen to your perspective. It is key that you can present some information that is viewed as new to the audience before asking for any change in their position. This is firstly courteous, but also gives the listener’s ego room to change without feeling demeaned (“based on this new information, I ask you to change”)

Dealing with a Hostile Audience

Specific Actions for Hostile Audiences

When providing new information it is vital that you help the listeners “assimilate”. How can you make it real for them? There are a number of techniques to bear in mind.

• Use stories (ideally real stories), metaphors, hypothetical situations
• Stress common ground
• Present statistics/data that is clear to conclude from
• Address conflicting evidence (what are the strengths and weaknesses of the conflicting evidence)
• AVOID exaggeration or gross hyperbole. The use of exaggeration in a number of areas of public debate has caused extreme entrenchment of the opposing sides. eg. immigration, climate change. The persuasive speaker works hard to keep to the facts and be clear about the logic of the proposed course of action.

Here's a short summary of the approach to speaking to a hostile audience:

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I hope this article gave you some practical ideas for how to take charge of your life.

Thanks for reading,

Conor

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