Choosing Platforms for Sharing Your Videos

Choosing Platforms for Sharing Your Videos

Creating a video marketing campaign successfully requires thinking ahead about where your videos will meet your target audience before you ever cast an actor or pick up a camera. In other words, you’ll need to choose the platforms on which you’ll share your videos at the start of your video production process. The platforms you choose will determine the finished product, including length, message, and aesthetics.

Ideally, you will have thought about how to reach your audience where they are most active even earlier, such as when creating a customer avatar of your target audience. If you haven’t, let’s go over key considerations for choosing the right platforms.

Meeting Your Target Audience Where They Are

When deciding on the right platform for sharing your videos, look at the target audience first. Your ultimate goal in producing these videos is for the right people to see them and take action, so you need to determine which platforms facilitate this engagement the best. Certain demographics statistically prefer some platforms over others, so there is no one-size-fits-all solution. The growth and engagement statistics for these platforms also change every year, so it’s important to research the most recent data and keep an eye on the changes as you continue your efforts.

Take a close look at your customer avatar. What is their age? Are they single or married, and do they have kids? What career are they likely to have? What kind of hobbies are they likely to enjoy, and what do they do with most of their free time? The answers to all of these questions will help lead you to the right platforms for their demographic.

Platforms to Consider

Social media has a few major players along with some lesser-known platforms. It can be tempting to only consider the big platforms – and you should try to have a presence on them – but it can also be extremely lucrative to invest time on platforms that are more niched if your target audience calls for it. 

Facebook, for example, is still the most popular social media platform out there despite slowed growth. Having a business page on Facebook is a huge asset to your marketing efforts because it acts much like a search engine. If your target audience includes millennial suburban parents, for example, it might be worth your while to spend time there. In 2022, people in this demographic likely have a Facebook profile and join pages and groups related to their local area and interests. 

Instagram, Snapchat, and TikTok are also major players in the social media space but tend to appeal to younger audiences. Trendier, visual-first shorter content often thrives there, making it a great place for microcontent targeted at Gen Z. Twitter and LinkedIn are better places for professional connections and serious conversations. The oft-forgotten Pinterest works well specifically for artists, creatives, and small businesses that sell unique products.

At Monzo Media Productions, we get great results for engagement on LinkedIn because that’s where our network lives and how we connect with our clients. We still spend some time on other platforms to keep a presence because leads can come from anywhere, but our ROI for LinkedIn remains superior.

Producing Videos With Platform In Mind

Identifying where your target audience lives is only half the battle. Now, you need to consider how your videos will work best on these platforms. Each platform has its own tools, features, and limitations for posting video content, so you’ll need to establish these in advance. 

For example, you want to make sure you have great visual captions for a place like TikTok but worry less about these captions on other platforms. On LinkedIn, you can get away with posting an entire traditional marketing video, but on Instagram, you’re limited in time and format. 

Each platform also has its tone and style – a humorous or disingenuous video might do well on Twitter, but LinkedIn would call for a more professional product. User behavior also makes a huge difference. Instagram Reels, for instance, will only keep promoting your video if viewers spend more than a few seconds watching and engaging with likes, comments, and shares.

If you’re inexperienced with the platforms on which you believe your target audience lives, it’s important to spend time learning about the intricacies before you produce your videos. Contact Monzo Media Productions for more guidance on choosing platforms for sharing your videos.

Having a Clear Target Audience For Your Video

Having a Clear Target Audience For Your Video

Without a clear target audience for your video marketing campaign, you might be completely missing the mark and not getting results. After all, how do you know what your message should be and how to communicate it if you don’t know anything about your potential customers? We urge our video production clients to create a detailed outline of their target audience before they invest any more time and effort into video production because the audience will determine everything going forward.

To help you get started, let’s talk about what we recommend for this part of the process at Monzo Media Productions.

Identifying Your Niche

When you’re running a business, you most likely have a niche – a specialty that makes you stand out from the crowd. For example, if you’re a private school that specializes in helping students with learning disabilities and you’re looking to build the ultimate school video marketing campaign, you will stand out from other private schools by marketing to families dealing with learning disabilities. Further, if you’re a boutique store, you might become well known for your unique offering of exclusively organic and fair trade products.

Once you’ve identified your niche, you can more effectively decide your target audience and formulate the perfect video campaign.

Creating Your Customer Avatar

By this point, you’ll understand your specialty, but you might need to dig deeper into what kind of customer would be interested. Before you even consider doing the video, you’ll want to have created at least one customer avatar. Customer avatars are an effective tool for identifying your target audience because they help you visualize exactly who your marketing campaign is targeting. 

While your general target audience might be “local parents of students with learning disabilities,” you’ll want to detail these potential customers even further by giving them a face. For example, you’ll want to think about their age, where they live, their income level, their interests, and their desires. As you keep digging, you’ll give them a name and personality that helps you speak directly to them as a person rather than a monolith.

Sharing Your Target Audience With Your Video Production Company

Having a customer avatar – or a few, depending on your target audience – will help your video production company to walk you through the best campaign decisions. For example, they’ll be able to help guide you in crafting messaging that would be most effective for your customer avatar. They’ll also be able to help you determine what types of aesthetics and visuals would be most appealing, and ultimately how to reach your target audience where they are most active and open to hearing your message.

For example, your video production company will encourage you to use urban visuals and shots when speaking to an audience that lives in an urban area. They’ll encourage you to use testimonials that highlight student success for athletes if you’re looking to build up your athletic program at your school. If you’re speaking to a student, you’ll want to share a student experience that highlights what a student would be interested in rather than what a parent would want to know.

Distributing Your Marketing Video to Your Target Audience

Finally, the length, format, and visuals will also depend on your target audience when it comes to distributing the marketing campaign. While best practice for video marketing is that all your videos stay under a few minutes in length, some platforms require under one minute or might promote videos more when they are only a few seconds long, also known as microcontent. Determining where your customer avatars spend most of their time, such as on LinkedIn versus Instagram, will help you decide on the finished product.
At Monzo Media Productions, we take video production one step further by helping our clients plan out their marketing strategy beyond production. If you’re interested in learning more about how to identify your target audience, how the customer avatar affects your video, or how you should promote your videos once they’re completed, send us a message.