Three Tactics to Better Understand What Motivates Your Audience

What motivates you may not motivate your target audience.

This goes for your clients AND your team.

I was talking with a CEO the other day who was struggling to motivate her team.

“I’ve tried everything to get my team energized. Even doubled their time off and incentivized them with MORE time off if they take all of their PTO.”

That’s a great plan… IF your team is enthused by time off.

Here’s the deal. From the CEO’s perspective, more time off means more time to travel to great new locations.

But maybe her team doesn’t feel as strongly about travel (or, more likely, doesn’t have the disposable income to fund such luxuries).

Listen to your audience(s) and discover what truly motivates them to take action.

Here are three ways to get to this information quickly for your clients (and potentially uncover some core values you can use to inspire new team members to join your organization):

1. Interview your stakeholders to uncover their “real” motivations for work. If you aren’t comfortable interviewing people yourself, hire someone to help out (having a third-party assist with this can improve the answers you receive as well).
2. Survey your stakeholders. In the absence of a budget or comfort with in-person interviews, a simple survey that drills down to motivations can be extremely helpful.
3. Tap into your (or your competitors’) reviews. If you have received customer reviews/testimonials over the years, read back through them to uncover motivators for working with your firm. The language people use in reviews can unearth some real gold when it comes to understanding their problems and how you helped solve them!

From a more fundamental perspective, just focusing on listening for pain points and challenges is a good place to start when trying to get a better understanding of people’s motivations.



Have you used other techniques to get a better understanding of what would help inspire your audiences to take action?