Audience analysis

Together with a solid goal and clear messaging, a successful campaign should also be designed with a specific audience in mind. Conducting an audience analysis – which is used to guide campaign design, messages, activities and media channels – will help you develop a clear idea of your campaign audience and what relevant materials will target those you most want to influence.

The following steps are vital for a thorough audience analysis to inform and guide your campaign:

1. Identify your primary and influential audiences: This will help your team to focus campaign messaging and materials on those who need to change behaviour for IYCF practices to improve, i.e. the primary audience, and those who indirectly influence IYCF practices, the influential audiences. You will also create sub-groups within the primary audience based on key characteristics like age, gender and more.
2. Develop your audience profiles: After identifying your primary audience and relevant sub-groups, create audience profiles to further describe the sub-groups characteristics and demographics, media consumption and behavioural determinants. This will help you to understand the group’s preferences, as well as their potential to make changes to IYCF behaviours and practices.
3. Learn from your primary audience: To understand your primary audience, plan and conduct focus group discussions, where a facilitator will lead conversations about the key IYCF behaviours that you chose during the situation analysis. The goal is to learn about audience knowledge about the selected behaviour(s), whether they have the skills and capability to make changes, have social supports for change to take place, and more.

An audience analysis tool is available and can be used to select the audiences for your campaign.