How to identify and build your audience through video

Thursday February 29, 2024

Whether it’s brand awareness or lead generation, video is an increasingly important aspect to marketing strategies. It’s an engaging, informative and accessible media so it’s easy to see why. To understand how to get the best performance from your video, though, you’ll need to plan how to identify and build your audience. After all, the effectiveness of a video is very much dependent on its being in front of the correct people. From working out who your audience is to making the decisions that will appeal to them, we’ll outline the best audience strategies for your video planning.

What does it mean?

Try not to confuse a target audience with a target market. This will stop you from being able to refine your focus. Using profiling points like geography, age, income, and behaviour, you can start to build a ‘typical’ customer for your business. This broad range of people are your target market. Within this segmentation sits a more tightly defined audience for each specific campaign. By working out your audience information first, you’ll find it more straightforward to make stylistic and content decisions for your video campaigns. So your content will be relevant and communicate successfully to the correct people.

Who are you all?

There are several different features that make up your audience profile. Use a range of tools to work out which are the common aspects of the people who you want to reach. This will give you a more rounded picture. You might then find it helpful to create an audience persona which you can refer back to.

Market Research

Use public records, industry papers, and your own sales history as potential sources available to you. Sometimes it’s more time efficient and thorough if you appoint a market research supplier to gather information. They can segment your market into defined areas to give you more of a steer to identify your audience.

Online Profiling

With website traffic, social media, and search data available, you can discover more about your audience’s motivations and preferences. Our online habits reveal a lot about our values and preferences, so are really helpful in identifying an audience. This data can be extremely useful when you come to structure a video story that builds a connection.

Behaviour and Intent

This is partially about where in the sales funnel your video audience are likely to sit. Is your video campaign intended to create interest, convert a sales lead, or widen awareness? This information should cross reference with other areas of profiling to enable you to find the right ‘hooks’.

Translating data into ideas

Specific video styles and tones are likely to be more appealing to particular audiences. So you need to cater to your audience preferences from the early concept stages. This will mean that they are more likely to react, engage with, and share your video.

Style

The demographic profile of your audience will give you a good idea about what kinds of video style your audience are used to. For example live action, presentation, or animation. Often, there are elements of nostalgia, aspiration, and expectation that are common amongst generational and demographic groups. Tap into these as part of early concept decisions.

Story

Narrative is key in engaging your target audience. Going by the audience profile, are they more likely to respond to an instructional narrative, or a more abstract, dramatic one? Should there be a central character? What length of time is optimal for your audience’s focus? To what extent is it appropriate to use special effects, soundtrack, or animated elements?

Tone

It’s incredibly important to strike the right tone. Getting this one element wrong has the potential to alienate and lose a swathe of audience (and potential customers) for good. Think about the parts of a video that set the tone, such as humour, sentiment, authority, and industry jargon.

Loyalty and growth in your audience

You can begin to inspire loyalty in your video audience from the outset. Simply by creating engaging, accessible content, your viewers are likely to trust your brand more and return to consume future content. So how can you make sure that your video is designed to inspire these things?

Surveys

By gaining feedback from existing customers, you can use insights to make campaigns more personal. You can also use feedback from examples of your target audience throughout the creative process. For example, at the early stages of video creation, test the response to a character or story with focus groups. This gives a good guide to check you’re on the right track.

Branding Consistency

Creating a video campaign that is jarring with your existing brand could be damaging. Consistency is so important in maintaining that layer of trust that exists between a brand and its existing customer base. Whether it’s colour palette, image style, or formality of tone, use your knowledge of your existing customers to maintain threads of consistency.

Being Seen!

Creating the most perfectly matched video for your target audience is one thing. But if no one actually sees it then what’s the point? It’s vital therefore that you choose the right channels to reach those audiences.

Media

Through which media do your audience consume video? YouTube, TikTok, Insta reels, Facebook, TV, Netflix? Or perhaps they’ll be seeing the video in a lobby, event, or trade show. Use this information to design the length and style of your video and decide whether features like motion graphics are appropriate.

The Hook

If your video is for public media consumption, it’s important to have a hook to stop your target audience member scrolling by. This might be a direct address voice, real life representation, explosive opening, or even a cute character.

Multiple Audiences

It’s likely that your audience will consume video across multiple platforms. Try not to simply use the same piece of video for all circumstances. With some clever editing, the same concept can be tailored to work best for different types of media or environments.

Take the time to identify who your video audience are, and you’re more likely to create a successful video. This is because you’ll find that your creative decisions become much more straightforward. For help along the way, have a chat with us any time at Ally & Mo!

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