Meet Your Audience Where They Are

The Echo Chamber Reality

Here's a truth most communications professionals hesitate to admit: your carefully crafted message probably won't reach your target audience directly. Not because your content isn't compelling, but because that's not how social media works anymore. Algorithms, echo chambers, and information overload mean even your most important messages can disappear into the void.

So what should you do? Stop trying to shout louder and start thinking strategically about where your audience actually spends time online.

Surround, Don't Just Target

When our social media team developed the social media strategy while at the Global Fund, we faced this exact challenge: how to reach diverse stakeholders across multiple continents about HIV, tuberculosis, and malaria. The solution? Atmospheres of Advocacy. A strategy that focuses not on reaching your audience directly, but on surrounding them with your message through the voices and platforms they already trust.

The approach is elegantly simple: identify who your target audience follows, which voices they find credible, and what platforms they actually use. Then build your communication strategy around those insights. If your audience trusts regional health experts on Facebook, that's where your content needs to live, not on a LinkedIn page they'll never see or a TikTok they won’t watch.

We applied this approach when telling the story of Krayé, a community health worker in Côte d'Ivoire. Rather than pushing content across all platforms equally, we strategically focused on Facebook, where we knew we could reach regional audiences in West African countries. We created French and English content, applied proven targeting profiles, and published at moments when our audience was most engaged. The result? 2.6 million impressions, 862,000 video views, and actual reach in the communities that mattered most.

One Size Fits No One

This isn't just about choosing the right platform. It's about understanding that not all content works everywhere. A three-minute documentary might resonate on one platform while a flipbook carousel performs better on another. Your in-depth policy analysis might land with donors on LinkedIn but completely miss community advocates scrolling through Instagram.

Meeting your audience where they are means doing the harder work of creating multiple entry points into your story, each tailored to the platform, the format, and the audience's existing behaviors and preferences.

Building Your Own Atmosphere

At Groundswell Strategies, we bring this tested methodology to help organizations stop broadcasting into the void and start building atmospheres where their messages can't be missed. Effective communication isn't about having the loudest voice; it's about being present in the spaces where your audience already gathers, speaking the language they already understand, and showing up on the platforms they already trust.

Ready to meet your audience where they actually are? Let's talk.

‍