It is no longer enough to have a good message or an entertaining video. You need to use both together to engage your target audience. Although to accomplish this you have to know who your audience is, and how to best engage them. An engaged video audience is more loyal, tend to give more (time or money) and will do so for longer. This makes the effort to engage your audience well worth it. Video can be a great tool to shift your audience from passivity to engagement.
Determine Your Audience
Who is your audience? Who do you want to engage with your message? Make sure you take some time to determine your audience, and who they are. With video one size does not fit all. People engage with you differently so it is important that you do the same. How you speak to your audience and deliver your message determines how it is received. For example you wouldn’t communicate with your grandmother the same way you would communicate with your 17 year old nephew. The same applies to different audiences, you need to determine your audience so that you can create an effective strategy.
Know Your Audience
Once you know who your audience is, than you can work to effectively target and connect with them. To know your video audience is to know how to adapt your message to best engage them. Especially within the charity sector, knowing your audience and speaking to them is vital. The charity sector relies largely on emotional connection, so knowing your audience helps you to deliver your message in a way that will reach their emotions.
Once you know your audience, keep them in mind through every stage of your video creation – from pre-production to video distribution. Keep in mind your audience’s demographics and how they prefer to receive information. Then cater to this to create an effective video.
Video to Engage your Audience
To drum up support and create trust with your video audience you must have open lines of communication. Video can help you connect and engage your audience. It bridges the gap between your supporters and the work your charity does. This is work that your audience supports, but through video they can be connected to it and gain a greater understanding of the work and its importance.
Through video you connect with audiences in a desirable medium and deliver communications that are meaningful and relevant. By engaging your audience you open up the conversation and create a two way conversation. When an audience engages with a message they are more likely to share it, which means that through engaging your current audience you can also create growth.
For example the video above was targetted at an older audience. We thus tailored it accordingly with a slower paced voiceover and non-juvenile animated characters.