When producing video marketing content, it’s common to want to please everyone. However, it’s worth keeping in mind that even Marvel can’t get 100% of humankind to watch their content and rate it ‘fresh’ on Rotten Tomatoes. The truth is, making a video that appeals to all and sundry is a mighty to impossible task.
So, it’s a great opportunity to really focus on your target audience. Ensure that your content is appropriate and engaging to them.
Carry Out Detailed Audience Research
First things first, it starts by carrying out in-depth research, of which by the end, you should feel like you really understand your audience and what makes them tick.
The Importance of Researching Your Audience
Missing this step on your video marketing journey will hinder you from discovering some of your key business questions, such as:
- What interests your audience?
- What issues are they facing?
- What are they looking for?
- What do they think about your brand currently?
All of which should be informing your products, services and in turn, your marketing tools.
It’s also a great way to organically communicate with your audience and implement their views into your company’s overall culture. People want to feel heard by their brands and suppliers.
If you don’t listen, another company likely will.
Audience Research Methods
When it comes to research there are many methods you could incorporate when gathering your information. And they fall into two categories:
Qualitative research seeks to uncover the feelings and opinions of your target audience. This will allow you to intuitively steer your product or services in a favourable direction for your target audience.
Examples of qualitative research are:
- One-on-one interviews
- Focus groups
These methods could be conducted and recorded via video conference platforms such as Zoom or Instagram Live. Make sure you’re asking your contributors open ended questions to really delve into their thought processes.
Quantitative research moves away from the more subjective opinions of your target audience and focuses on the cold hard facts and stats. For this mode of research you could use methods such as social media analytics and surveys.
Social media analytics is a great tool when researching your audience. You will be able to collect data such as:
- How many people view, like and share your content.
- What kind of content is most favourable.
- Where people stopped watching your video.
Video drop-off points are especially helpful as they help you figure out how long your videos or animated films should be. If most people are moving on after 20 seconds then that shows you, you have 20 seconds to capture their attention.
Make sure you use more than one method to gather your audience research. This is your blueprint for your overall marketing strategy so be thorough.
Define Your Customer Persona
After researching your target audience you will want to start putting together a customer persona. Having this in your arsenal is crucial to planning and creating video marketing tools that truly resonate with your end user.
What Is a Customer Persona?
A customer persona is a profile that represents your ideal end-user and it is these people that will account for a major portion of your company sales.
You’ll have a lot of data from your audience research which will help you start building your own personalised customer persona. From your audience research, you should be able to derive the following:
That’s just the tip of the iceberg. Once your customer persona is built you should know them like a good friend. And the great thing about good friends is, you can often predict what will appeal to them. Which is a great position to be in when marketing your company.
Market Segmentation
One thing that will become apparent when learning to target your audience effectively is that you’re going to want to create subsets based on a narrower criteria, such as demographics, behavioural, psychographic and geographic.
Demographic Segmentation
These demographic factors are commonly used as they dictate heavily on what products and services people need and segment by parameters such as:
- Age
- Gender
- Class
- Income
- Job Sector
That’s just naming a few. However, this isn’t the only segmentation marketers should take into account.
Behavioural Segmentation
Behavioural segmentation focuses on the patterns that people make; lifestyle, usage and consumption. For instance, those that are early adopters to new tech devices and those that prefer to more traditional forms of tech.
Know Where Your Audience Is
Even the most targeted content can fall between the cracks if not published in the right places. There’s no point in building content specifically for LinkedIn if your audience is more likely to be scrolling Facebook. So with your research find out what channels they are on. Are they the kind of person who spends a little too much time on YouTube? Or are they more receptive to being sent links via email?
Create Different Audiences for Different Videos
Not every video you produce will be the same (and it shouldn’t be). Some videos will be to win customers, whilst others will be to inform existing customers. You’re going to want to produce a diverse range of video content to reach people interested and regularly reminding people of your brand.
Always Define Your Target Audience
So with all that said, you should be well armed with the tools to define your target audience, create content that will appeal to them and upload videos that they can access. Because forgetting to define your end-user is the easiest way to make a video that gets lost in the virtual abyss!