“No problem can withstand the assault of sustained thinking. “
Voltaire
Video projects often start with an idea, and thereafter the marketing team are “chasing their tails” trying to make the video fit into their marketing strategy. It is an understandable approach because the idea is often triggered by something a team member sees or reads and thinks that will work for their brand. However the more effective way to create a video is to start by understanding your audience.
By starting with understanding your audience you are more likely to create content that matters to them. Putting your audience at the heart of your video strategy is just an extension of the idea of putting your audience at the heart of your brand proposition.
Audience Research
Before you can understand your audience you need to research them so that you will have the information needed to provide that understanding. Research sources can vary but some of the best sources of audience insight are,
1.Social Media
Social media platforms are a great place to gain audience insights and customer trends. If you can isolate the meaningless chatter from the marketing gems, you will gain valuable brand insights. Do not be afraid to throw out ideas into a social media space and see what feedback you get. Initiate questionnaires and encourage your audience to partake, you can make it a fun endeavor. Try to isolate meaningful trends from customer interaction in your product or service space.
2.Customer Facing Staff
Customer facing staff is at the “coal face” of your business and is best placed to provide customer feedback. Customer service staff can be too busy to provide meaningful customers trends. Create a means where they can provide information on trends and customer insights.
3.Web Analytics
Web analytics are often used for headline data trends but are not used to show underlying customer trends. If you do not already look at what customers are interested in on your website and how this is changing, web site analytics are often the first indicator to a brand that their habits are changing.
4.Ask Your Customers
This is an ideal way of doing research for video projects, because you can tailor the research to your video content. Be sure to get a cross section of customers and not just the ones you are most comfortable dealing with. The customers you perceive to be more difficult can give you valuable insights too. Remember by interviewing actual customers you are also allowing them to ensure their concerns are important to you.
5.Customer Feedback
Brands are often too busy to act on non-actionable customer feedback. This is a mistake as this feedback provides valuable insights about your customers. Think of a way of recording and reporting back on this information to your marketing team.
6.Look At Your Competitors
Looking at your competitors and what they are doing will give you valuable insights into the market place. Create a way of analyzing this information and creating a report that can be used to spot trends and new customer insights.
7.Think About Paid Research
If you still have no clear idea after using the unpaid options it might be time to get some professional research done. Try to get it tailored to your video strategy.
Understanding Your Audience
After your initial research the key to understanding your audience is found by answering the question
Who is my audience?
In the first instance by asking this question you are looking for your ideal customer. This may require you to set up a customer persona, which is simply a profile of your ideal customers by depicting what characters and traits, they possess. By using your research you will be able to understand what defines your customer, what interests them, what do they value and what opinions do they hold.
This can be very helpful with video projects, because if you create a video with an actual individual profile you can play to their likes and dislikes and appeal to the values they stand for.
This question should trigger three more questions
1. What is the single problem that defines my audience?
You need to know what problem your target audience has and how much does it impact on their lives. Put their problem on a scale of 1 – 10 where 1 means it hardly impacts them and 10 means it is a showstopper for them. This will help you understand how important it is for them to solve the problem. As a brand you may have multiple solutions so you can target your resources on videos that will have the most ROI (return on Investment) for your brand.
2. How do they currently deal with their problem?
You need to know how they currently deal with their problem and how effective they consider that solution. This will put you in a position to know what the strengths and weaknesses are with their current solution. This will allow you to use your video to target the problems they have with their current solution.
3. How does my brand solve their problem?
Once you have answered the first two questions you begin understanding your audience. Then you need to evaluate how successful your solution is in solving their problem and this leads to creating a video narrative that can address their problem.
Trust
Understanding you audience is not enough, for your video to succeed they need to trust you. When conducting your research look out for the factors that might inspire trust in your audience. The fundamental factor in building trust is never to mislead your audience and always state what you intend doing with research you carry out. Always fulfill all your legal GDPR requirements in respect of their data and its collection.
Bring It Together
“There’s a way to do it better – find it. “
Thomas A. Edison
The key to connecting with your video audience is to conduct as much research as feasible. Understanding your audience means you can create an audience persona that can be used to plan and determine the tone and style of your video .Knowing what problems your customer has and how they want them solved means your video will become more relevant to their lives..