We all know how important audience awareness is in writing. In business writing, your audience is typically clients, customers, and colleagues. Right? Yes and no. Yes, you must consider one or more of those audiences. But, no, it’s not that simple. Often there is a hidden audience to think about, and leaving them out of the loop can get you in trouble. Here are some examples of hidden audiences you may need to take into account:

Boss

Say you’ve been working on a project, and your new boss asks you to write a report on it to distribute to the entire department. “No problem,” you think. “I know my material, and I know my audience.” So you write your report based on your knowledge, perhaps some additional research, and what you think your coworkers want to know.

You send a 10-page draft to your boss, and it comes back with so many tracked changes, you don’t even know where to start. You don’t know your new boss yet, so you’re surprised to learn that commas are her pet peeve, that she prefers all documents to be shorter than five pages, and that she plans to rework the department’s entire messaging platform, starting with your document.

Your coworkers might have loved the document, but your boss didn’t, and it has to get past her before it can get to them. You try to explain that her changes will lessen audience understanding, but she’s not interested. Time for draft #2, in which you graciously reduce your comma usage by 75%, edit down to four pages, and throw in some new lingo.

Client’s Client

Let’s say you are a freelance writer, and you have a client (a marketing agency), and this client has a client (a construction company). You are assigned to write brochure copy for the construction company, and the marketing agency will provide the design.

Who’s the audience? The construction company’s clients, right? The people who need construction work done. You might survey them and find out their interests are: (1) the construction company’s ability to meet deadlines, (2) their ability to stay on budget, and (3) their safety consciousness.

But, what if the construction company is very involved in the community, and wants to make that the focus of their brochure? Of course, a big part of your job is educating your clients about the importance of audience awareness. But, in a situation like this, you may or may not have access to the client’s client, i.e. the person who needs that education. Hate to tell you, but you’d better make community involvement a big part of that initial draft.

Client’s Peeps

Imagine you are a freelance writer who has as a client a small business owner. This person has hired you to write copy for the company website. Great! You love helping small business owners get the word out. You go through the process, do some interviewing and some research, get a feel for what he wants to express, and what the company is all about, and you create a draft.

It comes back with not just your client’s comments, but comments from his business coach as well. Coach? Where did this coach come from? And why does she seem to have no understanding of what you and your client discussed?

The solution to this one is to always ask in advance who will be on the review team, and invite input from those people up front. But, if there are surprises, find out how much influence the coach (or spouse or consultant or adviser) has on your client. The more influence, the more they must be considered a part of your audience.

Sponsors

Say you work in the marketing department of a nonprofit, and you create a stunning press release to draw community members in to your next fundraising event. It presents the needs of your agency in a touching and compelling way. You run it by your executive director, as well as a couple of colleagues. Everyone says it looks great, and you send it out to several online and traditional outlets.

Next thing you know, you receive an e-mail from your development director saying several sponsors of the event have read the release online and something’s not right. It failed to mention the contributions of these sponsors. Doh! Since the release is already “out there,” create a new release, and/or increase the visibility of the sponsors’ logos on the website that the release points to.

Competitors

As the owner of a widget manufacturing company, you have a proprietary process for the fastest widget assembly line there is. None of your competitors can keep up. You want to impress your distributors, so you publish this proprietary process on your website. Your distributors are duly impressed, and you get some new business. But, suddenly your competition is looking less sluggish. In fact, they are starting to outpace you. They’ve read your website too. Time to remove the process from the website, and start thinking of how to ramp it up to get back in the lead.

Of course, these are just a few examples of hidden audiences. Feel free to share others, as well as your strategies for including them in your writing process.

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