Why Knowing Your Audience is Key to Effective Video

Have you ever wondered how some videos just instantly connect with you and others you don’t really pay much attention to? This is why knowing your audience is key to effective video. A video that is not tailor-made for the audience at hand will not resonate with them, is unlikely to compel the viewer to take action, and may not achieve the desired results.

Fortunately, there are several basic steps you can take to get to know your audience. Consider these 3 steps to help you gain valuable audience insights that will help you create compelling video content that drives visitors to take action.

Step 1: Perform Basic Research & Identify Your Audience

The first step to understanding who your audience is and how you can create content that compels them to take action is to perform basic research. This includes using your buyer personas (If you have those outlined) to define the audience that you want your video to target. If you don’t have marketing personas outlined, or you are unfamiliar with the word “persona”, this is the term used to describe a fictional character that has the ideal makeup of your key customer. You use personas to help you define marketing approaches that will connect with the target audience more precisely.

When you create a persona, start by considering the following basic details:

• Age
•  
• Socioeconomic status
•  
• Gender
•  
• Marital status
•  
• Job role
•  
• Education level

You likely have this information through survey data, customer reports, and other marketing background details but if you don’t you can begin online to research the details and prepare personas that target your key audience members.

For instance, you may have a user persona that is a child, from a wealthy family, between the ages of 10 and 12, that likes to play outside. In comparison with this, you may also have a related persona that is the parent of a 10 or 12 year old, that has a key job role in a field where income is at least $100,000 annually, and enjoys keeping kids in sports and outdoor activities. Any of this kind of data that you can utilize to target your audience will help you to craft an effective video.

Step 2. Build on Your Research

Continue to build on the information that you already have to define personas that will literally connect with your audience members. Dig deep into your audience’s dreams, desires, and potential problems so that you can provide video content that relates to their dreams, fulfills their desires or provides a solution to their known problem.

Consider how you can help you audience out. Keep a record of the responses you have when you speak with your target audience about important matters. Ask them what their biggest concerns are or what their most ambitious goals are. Define what they see as an opportunity at happiness–and build on it.

Fully understanding your audience really begins here, in the step where you continue to build on existing research and get to know the key emotions of your prospective customers. It may take more time trying to uncover these tiny details, but the end result is worth every second. Getting to know your audience will help you to produce video content that speaks directly to them. THIS is how you create videos that have your prospective customers hanging onto every single word.

Step 3. Uncover Audience Insights

There are several places where you can uncover audience insights once you have a baseline demographic audience defined. For instance, you can use research panels, google analytics, and all sorts of audience insights tools to further define your audience’s specific pain points. Doing so, and later create a video that addresses the pain points directly, allows you to reach your audience in a way that you never could before and connect.

Audience insights offer deep understanding into the human behaviors that your pre-defined audience is likely to take part in or the attitudes they are likely to portray. These insights act as a logical extension of the information you have already discovered in getting to know your audience. This is the insight into what drives your audience to take action.

Whatever it is that you define here, be sure that you create video content that touches on these pain points, solves the problem that your audience has, and compels them to feel like there is no better solution than yours to their situation. If you’re not sure still what the pain points of your target audience are, continue researching, surveying, and gathering information in-depth as frequently as you can until you have the knowledge you need to craft quality footage that resonates with your viewers. Knowing your audience is key to effective video.