Blog 49: Know Your Audience

I’ll be honest with you, when I’m writing a poem, I almost never think about my target audience. In fact, I never think about who my target audience is. Sure, I did think about who I was writing for when I was a student at university, but only because we were tasked with doing so in order to analyse our own writing. I’ve always written poetry with myself as the sole target audience to please. Maybe it’s because I’m a Virgo, but satisfying my own rigid and slightly neurotic ego is at the forefront of the creation of every single poem I write. I’m a harsh self-critic and the majority of what I write ends up lost to time or torn into miniscule pieces (just in case the bin-man was to read my inadequate self-loathing) and tossed into the bin.

Maybe it’s because poetry is often so personal that I’m more focused on remaining authentic to the feelings, images, senses and emotions I experienced at the time of whatever it is that I am writing about. All I know is that my target audience is an afterthought, whether that be a negative or positive thing.

Of course, if we’re looking to publish our poetry and share it with a wider audience, we must think about who it is that we want to or who will read our writing. In order to successfully edit and then market our work, we have to know who our audience will be. There are two types of audiences that we will end up writing for. First, we have the target audience, or the audience that we have in mind when writing our poetry. This may be an audience that we are writing directly to or for. It could be an audience that shares the same culture, experience, class, political struggles, colloquialisms, language, etc.

Practically all my poetry is an ode to the working-class, people of my class who share similar class struggles are generally my target audience (when I do consider audience) because these are the readers who will understand the specific poverty related circumstances that I discuss. If I was to identify an even more specific audience that I aim to write for, I would say working-class women. Of course, as a working-class woman myself, the vast majority of my writing is focalised through the lens of a working-class woman. This is the audience that will inherently understand the specificities of the experiences that I write about on a deeper level. Whilst these experiences may be idiosyncratic, they are also connective to the experiences of my demographic.

The second type of audience we ultimately write for is the actual audience. No matter how carefully we think through who our target audience is and whether we write with them in mind, the fact is that there will always be people outside of our communities or cultures that enjoy reading and learning about our experiences. One of my favourite poetry collections is Caleb Femi’s Poor. Whilst he writes about topics that overlap with my own personal experiences as a working-class person, he also writes about topics that I will never experience, such as racial inequality and racism. I may not be his target audience, yet I am still a part of his audience because of that mutual ground.

Questions to consider when thinking about your target audience:

• Is there a specific audience, demographic or psychographic that you intend to reach with your poetry? And why?

• What identifying factors are included to reach this specific audience? (Style, form, genre, grammar, language, voice, tone, POV, experience, interests, habits, class, culture, religion, ethnicity, nationality, geography, sexuality, gender, politics, values, occupation, age, etc.)

Are your themes relevant to a specific or universal audience? Is the experience that you are writing about niche, or will it be understood by a broader audience?

• Is the language used identifiable to a range of communities or a specific community? Are you using cultural language, colloquialisms or a combination of languages? Who will understand the voice, style and language used in your writing?

• Does the form utilised appeal to a specific audience? Are you using a closed form that may appeal to more experienced readers of classical poetry? Or are you using an open form that may be easier to read and appeal to a broader audience of people who may not be as familiar with poetry?

• How and why is your poetry applicable to your target audience? In what way could your poetry connect with or benefit this specific audience?

• What does your ideal reader want and how can you meet their needs?

• What other content does your target audience engage with? How is your poetry similar to this content?

• Who are the authors, poets or artists that you compare your work to? Who are they marketed towards, and who are their actual audience?

• Is your poetry compelling enough to engage, not only with your target audience, but also with potential outside audiences? Are there any overlapping themes or experiences that are connective with a range of communities?

Ultimately, regardless of whether or not you have your target audience in mind when you are writing your poetry, you still need to consider them when it’s time to edit your work. Ask yourself the questions above as you enter the editing process in order to figure out the direction of editing that will lead your writing towards your desired target audience. Marketing your writing is imperative if you want to develop an identified audience or readership. So, try to bear them in mind, even if your ego gets in the way (speaking from experience, of course).