Employees come in all different stripes . They ' re not one audience , but several . There are generally large differences across various employee audiences , in terms of what they want to hear , from whom and how they want to receive communications . The communication needs of the folks in sales or in the retail stores will differ from those in the distribution center or on the manufacturing line . Managers who are expected to cascade communications to their teams will need a different level of information than those they manage .
Unfortunately , most large companies don ’ t seem to know much about their employee audiences . Having a good handle on just the basics , like the percentage of the workforce that doesn ’ t have dedicated computers , is surprisingly rare . If you ’ re stymied on those sorts of details , you ’ re not alone .
On the external side , it ’ s a different story . Your company probably spends a great deal of money and effort to learn who your customers are . Marketing research will include customer demographics , for starters , but also the psychographics of your various target audiences . If , for instance , you sell pillows , the company no doubt knows who in the family buys the pillows ; what life events or milestones will trigger the purchase of new pillows ; what problems they expect a new pillow to solve ; and even what a pillow represents to a customer emotionally .
Knowing your audience is at the core of changing behavior . As marketers , companies want to change the behavior of their audience to get them to relate to the brand and do more business with the company . As internal communicators , we want to change the behavior of our audience to get them to do any number of things — from aligning with the vision of the company to accepting a major organizational change to abiding by the social media policies .
YOUR AUDIENCE MATRIX COMES FIRST
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This is simply an exercise in slicing and dicing your audience so that you can see more clearly the needs of each group . For instance , your audience matrix will separate your audiences into groups depending on factors like whether employees have a company email ; are customer-facing ; manage other people ; speak English as their first language — or maybe whether they ’ re part of the legacy company or the one just acquired .
Now map out what communication channels are available to each of those groups . For instance , email may not be an option for some audiences . Or digital signage may exist only in the manufacturing plants and distribution centers but not in the corporate offices .
Finally , think through how the messaging or depth of information might vary from audience to audience . Although you always want a unified message across the company , some audiences will be more interested in one aspect of the message or will want a greater level of detail .