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.
