“To know what you know and what you do not know, that is true knowledge.”
Confucius
Video content needs to resonate with your video audience. This is unlikely to happen if the video producer fails to understand what their audience wants. The best way to understand your audience is to do some research on them.
Audience research can be an expensive and time-consuming process. I have listed my top 7 tips to help you research and thus understand your video audience.
1.Start With What You Know
The best way to understand your audience is to look at what you already know. Think about what you already know about your audience and how accurate this information is. This is your starting point for any audience research.
2. Common Experiences
In a world where ever increasing globalisation means we lead similar lives we have many common experiences. For example a large portion of humanity are used to queuing for all sorts of things and are aware of the frustration this brings. In the western world we are confronted with all sorts of reality TV and the impact this has on our society. The problem of waste disposal is a universal problem and global warming affects everyone.
These common experiences and the other ones that exist will help you to further understand your video audience. They will give you ideas on the type of video content that will resonate with your video audience.
3. Existing Research
I am a huge fan of not “reinventing the wheel” if something exists already, use it if possible. In every area that effects humanity there is publically available data that documents the entire human condition. This data details what we like to do, buy, eat or read. Use this data to help you understand your potential video audience.
4. Talk To Everyone
Conversation is a very underrated source of market information. People want to live in a better world and will freely share information if they think you will help solve peoples problem. Talk to your colleagues and customers and you will be surprised at the amount of non-proprietary information they will share with you.
5. Review Your Feedback
One of the most often overlooked sources of information about your video audience is customer feedback. This is where you will get insights into how customers are struggling or succeeding with your products or services. Customer feedback is marketing gold because they are real live insights from the world in which your audience lives.
6. Competitor Research
Have a look at what your competitors are doing right and wrong and learn lessons from them. This allows you to avoid their mistakes and improve on what they are doing right.
7. Social Networks
No list of sources of information would be complete without using all the insights gained from social media networks. Social media gives you a real-time insight into what matters to and inspires your video audience. The trick is to filter out what is important to your networks and what is just hyperbole.
“The only source of knowledge is experience.”
Albert Einstein
Having collected this research you need to apply what you have learned to create a video that will resonate with your audience. Concentrate on showing how you understand the problems your audience are having and show how you can help solve them.