Every brand needs to find fresh and unique ways to resonate with its audience. Keeping up with social media trends, current conversations and new interests give a video content marketing strategy vigour and excitement. Creating binge-worthy content is a brilliant way to keep your clients, both current and future, hooked and engaged with your branding. But what do we mean by ‘binge-worthy content’? Promotional videos? Brand videos? Testimonials?
Not exactly. If you want to draw in your audience, or – more specifically – a niche audience, this type of video content won’t be about your products and services. This might sound counterintuitive, but a video series solely about one product won’t create the kind of engagement you want to inspire. Exploring a different avenue of your audience’s interests, likes and dislikes will lead you in the right direction.
But what does this mean? Figuring out the specific and targetable subcultures your clients are members of will motivate them to introduce your brand to their communities, resulting in more viewers, customers and sales. Below, we’ve listed many ways you can define your audience for your video series.
The Audience
The first step is finding exactly what external issues excite your audience. What specific topics are they enthusiastic about? What communities are they part of? What drives them?
Categorising your existing customer base into subcultures and interest groups will give you a clearer idea on the basis of your video series. This will increase how much your consumers relate to your brand and share your content. Think about certain causes they are active and passionate about. Think about some of their basic demographics – younger consumers will be more engaged with different topics than older consumers. Focus on one targetable subculture to home in your ideas and avoid confusion amongst your consumer base.
These categories could be anything to do with the arts, culture, sport, fashion, even cuisine. Dividing your customer base up into these sections will help you narrow down the potential topic your video series should be about. But also make sure if you are legally allowed to cover that certain issue – you don’t want to get into a convoluted copyright problem with a bigger brand.
Figuring Out Your Niche
When finding your brand’s niche, it’s important not to pre-empt the interests of potential clients. This could alienate them from your brand before they’ve even made a purchase. Potential clients have come to your website to see what products and services have on offer, whereas current clients want to see what more your brand can contribute to a conversation they’re enthusiastic about.
Outside of your product, there is a multitude of topics you’re allowed to talk about. This video series isn’t about what products and services your brand offers, as this won’t create the binge-worthy content you want your video content marketing strategy to achieve. It might be a daunting prospect to create video content that isn’t directly linked to your products, but it will inspire your clients to talk about your brand on various forums, online interest groups and even group chats. Launching a well-researched video series about a niche topic will also reveal a more human side to your company and show what else your brand cares about.
Researching Your Audience
As with all aspects of an effective video content marketing strategy, research is key to hitting the right notes with your client base. Identifying your buyer personas will be essential in developing a solid idea of what your clients are interested in. Why do they like your brand? Why do your products and services appeal to them? How do your brand’s values resonate with them?
Your content marketing strategy should hone in on three or four different buyer personas. From these, you can thoroughly explore the specifics of their characteristics to find a topic of interest and figure out the subculture you want to target. Analysing both the psychographics and demographics of your buyer personas will also help you figure out the most marketable interest group or issue. Remember, this video series is about engaging clients in a topic that is constantly evolving and relevant, and has a large community talking about it. Resonating with and reaching as many current and potential clients as possible is the purpose of this video series, so you want to pick a topic a large section of your client base is interested in and has a large online following.
Surveys and Interviews
Creating surveys or undertaking interviews with your most loyal customers will also give you a clear insight into what your clients’ external interests are. It’s worth mentioning that these questions shouldn’t be about your product or brand. You’re not looking for client feedback specifically about your products – you’re looking for other ways to reach and relate to your audience.
Here’s a list of questions to get you started with your survey or interview:
- What are your hobbies?
- How do you spend your free time?
- Which other brands are you interested in?
- Which organizations are you a member of?
- Which communities are you part of?
- What are your favourite TV shows and films?
- What are your favourite books, newspapers and magazines?
- Do you listen to podcasts?
- Do you have any strong opinions about our brand and its identity?
As you can see, most of these questions are about your clients’ social life, free time and cultural interests. You can alter these questions in any way you want to develop a more solid picture of your clients’ personalities. Through asking questions you’ll be able not only to figure out the niche topic you want to incorporate into your video content marketing strategy but also how you can best tailor your content to align with your clients’ interests.
Research Tools
Once you’ve figured out the specific interest you want to focus your video series on, it’s time to look at what methods you can use to conduct your research. Where online do your clients engage in this topic? How can you become involved? And, most importantly, what else can you contribute to the conversation?
We recommend starting with social media. Twitter is usually the best place to research trending topics and conversations. Through Twitter, you can see which issues are the most important and relevant that people take to heart. Trending hashtags and stories that are constantly being retweeted will guide and help you pick out the aspects of your chosen interest you want to talk about in your video series.
Reddit is also a brilliant place to delve into the depths of a subculture. If the interest group is large enough, it will have a subreddit, where regular and engaging conversations are happening.
On a more technical basis, you can use SparkToro and Followerwork. These are tools specifically designed to analyse your client base’s main interests. They help discover topics your existing client base is engaging with by looking at how your customers identify themselves in their social media bios, and which posts create the most passionate and exciting interactions.
Consistency
Now it’s time for your marketing strategy to turn into a promotion strategy. Start promoting your video series months in advance, so that you gain enough engagement with your existing client base before your actual launch date. You want as many people as possible to talk about your video series before you’ve even finished filming. As this is unlike promotional video content and online testimonials, it’s important to tease your clients with snippets about your video series.
Creating trailers and behind-the-scenes footage will start piquing your customers’ interest in your upcoming video series and will motivate them to talk about it amongst their communities. You can slowly reveal the people behind your video series – actors, cameramen, sound and lighting technicians, and video editors. Even a short clip introducing your topic and why you’ve decided to get involved will show your clients what your stance is and how thoroughly you’ve done your interest. You could also create a dedicated page on your website to host your video series. All of this effort will encourage your clients to share your content and make your video series easily accessible and exciting.
Audience Location
This is part of your social media promotion strategy. Knowing where your existing customers spend most of their time on social media will show you which social media platform is most effective to promote your video series. A younger audience will spend more time on Instagram and TikTok, whereas an older one will watch content on Facebook. As Twitter is a key place to conduct your research into your interest groups, it could also be a good idea to promote your content there. Make sure you tailor your content to each specific social media platform you wish to use to make the most of your social media promotion strategy.
It’s important to note that different platforms have different targeting capabilities. A lot of these features are advanced, meaning you can take advantage of gaining specific information to target specific clients. Different platforms also have different metrics you can use to measure how well your audience is engaging with your video content.
Word of Mouth Marketing
Word of mouth marketing is a very powerful marketing tool. This is how clients will share and talk about your content with other like-minded individuals, who will potentially become interested in your brand. As this marketing tool is very much out of your hands, you want your audience reaction to be as positive and promising as possible.
No matter how much you’ve researched your topic, there might be something important you’ve missed, be that its history or current relevance in today’s society. Respond to negativity by re-examining your plan for your video series and create a slightly different avenue for your content to navigate. This doesn’t mean you should start completely from scratch, but making slight changes here and there will show that you’re listening to your audience and not just jumping on the bandwagon purely to push for more sales.
You can also create show promo kits for your employees and guests involved in the making of your video series. This is an excellent way to gain more reach as you’re encouraging your employees and guests to share your video content on their social media platforms, which will lead to reaching their audiences.
Final Thoughts
Creating a video series about a niche interest that doesn’t involve your brand or products in any way shape or form might seem counterintuitive. However, this type of video series can add character to your brand and reveal other interests you share with your audience. This will create binge-worthy content that is both exciting and shareable, resulting in drawing in more potential clients.
We can make video work for you, not the other way around. With over 2000 videos, both animated and live-action, we can sort all of the logistics associated with your testimonial video, meaning no hassle or stress on your part. Still interested? Contact us to get our creative partnership started.
