Know Your Audience

Determining your audience factors off of the type of person that you are and the type of things you portray.

For someone like me that journals and has the goal to someday publish a book; my audience is directed towards myself but also to other teenagers because we never think to realize how much each one of us are alike in ways and how we could probably sit and tell story after story just based off of someone else’s individual story. By knowing who your true audience is, it then gives you the boundaries on how you can talk, or how you can dress, and even how you have your art play out in the end will be a huge impact on your target audience. Is it age appropriate? Is it relatable? Can the audience decipher what type of mood my art creates based on their level of knowledge?

Influencing your audience is probably the hardest thing to obtain with your own piece of art; you want to grab their attention and pull them in, rather than bore them and drown them in something they don’t want to know about. But it’s not always what you create that influences them, it’s what lies behind it as well and that is yourself. How you hold yourself day to day and the things you do outside of making artwork can have a huge impact, or influence, on the audience you plan to acquire. As an assistant dance teacher for kids from five to fifteen; those little girls look up to me as a huge influence in their life to become a better dancer and have the opportunities I have been fortunate enough to have even had. To be their influence I always have to show them that hard work gets you farther than you make think, and never giving up lets you open thousands of doors for yourself without even realizing. Being a role model doesn’t just take place in the dance studio; it has to be everywhere, and every little thing I do I have to think about who my audience is. For example some of the little girls follow me on my Instagram and Twitter; I always have to make sure it is appropriate for them to be seeing because that could potentially ruin how they look up to me.

Whenever I am given a paper to write, I have to consider, who will be reading through this? That is where I find my boundary on what I can and cannot say or do in the piece of writing I put together. So thinking about that, I have now been influenced to portray what my readers are expecting from me and that sometimes could mean very professional writing or very strict to the point with no description. I always take the time and understand who I am presenting all I do too, and make sure I can somehow make my audience or reader in my artwork one hundred percent interested.