How marketers can target a video to the right audience
Video storytelling is a powerful tool to create change within your desired audience. This change might be making a purchase, a donation, getting involved, or signing up to an email newsletter. Whatever you want your video to achieve, you need to think about the data you have on your prospects.
It’s important to know who your customers are and why they might change their behaviour. This data – particularly from happy existing customers – is a great way to gather the necessary information.
Here we will discuss how simple market research can give you the necessary data to create change within your desired audience.
Buyer Personas
When we start working with a brand, we ask our client for detailed buyer personas to help us create a video that will speak directly to the intended audience. But how do you get to the point where you can give us valuable information about your target audience?
Market Research is the process of gathering information about your audience’s requirements. It can be as simple as a questionnaire you ask previous customers about their demographics (age, gender, location etc.) and their reasons for buying your product, and how satisfied they are with the product.
Questionnaires can also be further broken down into questions about the problems they face, the solutions they are looking for, and their aspirations.
The Questionnaire
We’ve created a helpful template that includes some example Market Research questions, that you can ask previous customers (or intended customers if you’re pre-launch). The PDF we’ve made includes suggestions questions you can ask your customers, but you’ll need to tailor these to your specific needs.
Here’s a quick breakdown:
Demographic
It’s always good to start with finding out who your demographic is – age, location, economic background etc.
To do this, think about why you’re asking for their demographic information and what conclusions you can draw from it.
We like to throw in a curveball question into the demographic section which asks what kind of music the customers most like. If there’s a common response to the answers we can use this information to help us choose music that the audience will respond to.
Knowing who your audience is will help you decide what actors or characters to include in your videos.
The Problem
The next questions are geared towards identifying problems and addressing how your product can offer a solution. We suggest asking your clients what problems they had before they found your product or service. You can tailor this questions to be specific to your offering.
Next, ask the audience how they felt when they had the problem. It’s important that we get to know this because people make buying decisions on emotion rather than logic. By understanding the mindset that they were in when they were searching for a solution, we can tailor a story that empathises with their situation.
Then we suggest asking them what the problem would have been like in the long term if they didn’t find your solution. This is an important question because any good story needs to have some jeopardy in it. We like to tell stories that contain conflict, tension and stakes. That leads to drama which will make the video entertaining and memorable. The fear of allowing a problem to continue is a great motivator for people to take action by purchasing a solution.
Your Brand
Next we suggest asking about the trustworthiness of your brand. If we can determine a pattern about why your brand resonated as a trustworthy one, we can double down on those factors. It’s important to build trust because people only buy from brands they think they can deliver on their brand promise.
An essential question to ask is “what makes your brand unique?”. We love to help brands make videos that stand out from the crowd in order for them to be memorable. If your audience can tell you what was unique about your brand, we can bring that essence through into the concept for the video and make some truly outstanding content.
Your Product/Service
By asking the audience what they hoped to achieve when choosing your product, we’re gaining a deeper understanding of their mindset when making the purchase. If we find a commonality in the answers, we can lean into this aspiration in the storyline of the video. Good stories are made from characters who have goals then they face barriers to those goals, which they overcome with the help of your product or service.
Therefore, we suggest asking your customers to describe the barriers they faced in achieving their goals and any barriers they may have faced when purchasing your product. Often we can address any objections viewers may have in the storyline and help them to overcome those objections.
We also encourage you to ask about what it was like for them to use your product or service. This can be really useful when identifying USPs of your product such as ease of use, simplicity, speed etc.
Positive Outcomes
Finally we ask what the positive outcome was from their decision to use your product and most importantly, how that felt. Once again, by tapping into their emotional response we can draw from their experience to make the conclusion of the video realistic and desirable.
Questionnaire
You can download our template questionnaire (PDF) here.
Please feel free to turn document this into a Google Form to ask your customers to complete or – even better – use it as the basis for a telephone interview or a video call. People say a lot more on calls than they in writing. Plus, spoken phraseology may offer key insights that we wouldn’t get from a written response. You can use transcription services to collate responses and get the information into a format you can easily access and search.
Once you have gathered all this information you can give it to your video production company, and they can use it to craft videos that will speak directly to your potential future customers.
The more market research you’ve done, the better we can craft a video experience for your audience that connects with them on an emotional level.