With the rise of social media and brands focussing more on their digital content, the users have a hard decision to make when it comes to choosing their favourite creators.
Currently, users base their decision on how the content is relevant to their life and interests, how unique and engaging it is, what value does it carry.
Knowing that, brands had to realise that in order to make their content successful, they need to focus on specific audience rather than assuming that their audience is everyone using the World Wide Web – there is no way of pleasing every person with one single video. In this article, we help you identify best ways of targeting your video to a specific audience.
Who is your audience?
Your video marketing strategy will never have a chance of a success if you don’t figure out who should be seeing your content. Before producing the video, you need to carefully research and plan – make sure that you understand targeted audience, their needs and expectations.
Firstly, you need to base your research on a buyer’s persona – an image of your potential customer. You and your team need to understand who is your product or service for. In this step, you should think of their age, occupation, area they live in, daily life, hobbies and so on. Then, analyse how your product or service can be of an asset to their life. You can get all this information through research, organising focus groups or talking to your previous clients.
When creating a buyer’s persona or personas, make sure to consider both demographics and psychographics of your target – anything from location, gender, education, income level, ethnic background to personality, behaviours, lifestyle and values.
Clearly state the purpose of your video – what do you want to achieve with it? Does it target new customers or current ones? Maybe you want to create a content for your employees? The subject of the video is a huge part of assessing who your target audience is.
Discussing the purpose of your video not only will help you with targeting the audience, but also help you with tailoring your video content to the certain people – for example, a video you want to create to sell the product to your current customers will be different to the one aimed at new clients. As you can see, choosing target audience has a big impact on the actual content and how you produce it.
Reaching your target audience
Your videos should be a way of bonding with your viewers. To create a successful relationship with them, you need to not only tailor your content to their interests and needs, but also understand how to deliver it in a way that directly speaks to them.
Social Media Channels
Even though it may feel YouTube is the best and only way to deliver your videos, you should stop here and reconsider using other social media channels. Depending who your audience is, you should see in your research which social media channels they use mostly and then push your content through your profiles there. Video is now a high-performing content format and platforms that were originally not designed for uploading good quality videos, now offer features such as IGTV or Watch Party that allow you to post more than just a picture or text.
Facebook & Instagram:
In 2012, Instagram has been bought by Facebook and since that time businesses have the possibility of creating and targeting audiences on both platforms through Facebook Business Manager. This ad manager allows you to target your audience through demographics, age, used devices, interests, behaviour, and so on. You can create multiple audiences and save them, which is helpful when creating various ad campaigns that target different audiences.
Facebook also offers a dynamic targeting option called Lookalike Audiences. Firstly, you choose a source audience which can be created with information from your mobile app, pixel or fans of your FB Page. Next, Facebook analyses the behaviour of users in the source audience and identifies the similarities. Based on that information, the feature creates a persona and targets users that act in similar ways.
Youtube
When deciding to promote your video on YouTube, you are given two options of targeting your audience: based on the person (their demographics and characteristics) or based on the content they are viewing. After choosing your strategy, you are given additional options such as: placements (targeting individual channels relevant to your business), keywords (words and phrases that will lead users to your video), topics and In-Markets (choosing from Google’s list of preset audiences). You can even specify an audience by their Life Events, such as marriage or moving into new home. YouTube offers many other interesting targeting options and if you would like to explore them all, visit Google’s help section on that subject here.
LinkedIn offers very similar way of targeting your specific audience. In this case, location is a required field and ad campaigns target by permanent/long-term locations only. Good news is you can choose multiple locations. In addition to this, you are given number of other features in your search – anything from company details, demographics and education, to job experience and interests. If you are interested in more details on how to target your specific audience on LinkedIn, visit their guide here.
Audience Targeting Tools
As you can see above, different social media channels offer various ways of targeting your audience. Your task is to specify which channels are used by your specific audience and make sure you are taking advantage of the tools that certain platforms offers. Utilising Google AdWords, Facebook Business Manager or LinkedIn Manager will help you with reaching the right people with your video content.
Language of your audience
It is crucial to talk the language of your targeted audience, otherwise you will miss out on getting your point across. Depending who your buyer’s personas are, you may want to reconsider the content you are putting out there. Are you trying to reach middle-age managers who are interested in investments? Or do you want to communicate with tech-savvy millennials? Or maybe your product is created specifically for teenage girls? Words, phrases and the tone of voice you will be using in your video, depend entirely on your target audience.
Experienced video marketers will be able to help you out and choose the right language for your audience. This way, your video will come across natural and professional, tailored for the specific group you want to reach.
Video Format
Choosing the right video format is absolutely crucial when planning on how to target your audience. Diverse groups of people will react differently to certain types of videos and knowing your audience well will help you with choosing the accurate format. We suggest considering some of those types of videos:
How-to Videos - if you know that your target audience are people who like new challenges, this is a great format to reach them. We can see that this type of video is very often used in beauty and sports industry, but also gadgets or furniture. In fact, some of the highest-ranked videos on Youtube are actually how-to videos.
Humour Videos – they are a great idea if your goal is to expand your customer base and gain followers on your social media. Funny videos are often shared which helps with exposure for your brand. Good aspect of humorous videos is the fact that most of the time they are low-budget and easy to create.
Behind-The-Scenes - those types of videos are the best for B2B audiences. They give your clients valuable insights into your company’s daily life, including the production process of your product or service. You may want to also consider sharing case studies and testimonials in those videos. This format also helps with building trust between you and your customers, who can see how exactly your company works and therefore feel more connected with you and your employees.
Animation Videos – this format is brilliant if you want to share educational or motivational content. Motion videos make this type of content more interesting and engaging. If your target audience includes students, salespeople or new clients, this is the format you may want to consider.
In Summary
As we have previously mentioned, video is considered one of the most powerful content tools that currently exist in the digital world.
To make your video successful, you need to carefully tailor your audience and research the most suitable ways of reaching them.
Our advice is to consider all social media platforms, in the end choosing the ones that are most suitable for your specific audience. Remember to use Social Media Intelligence Tools to reach your targeted audience and track your content performance. And more importantly – have fun and experiment when creating your video content!
Sign up below to receive more video marketing advice and speak to Film Haus for professional, affordable video production.
