Identifying and understanding your target audience isn’t just a part of the video production process. It’s the most important part. Great video content isn’t about you or your company – it’s about your audience, your customer. If your video content is engaging, it can:

• Rank your company better in search
• Increase web traffic
• Create more leads
• Increase conversions
• Educate your customer
• Identify your brand as an industry leader

But your content is never going to be engaging if it’s on a topic your audience couldn’t care less about. Imagine you run into a coworker on your lunch break. You strike up a conversation and they begin telling you about their recent vacation and what a blast it was. At first you’re interested, maybe even considering a beachy trip to the same white sand island – but it quickly enters the realm of boring. You try to get involved in the conversation, but they are clearly more interested in talking about themselves. Eventually you get fed up and walk away.
That’s what you don’t want your video content to be.

Your video should be the most interesting man (or woman) in the office. The type that has a great story to tell, but understands the importance of directing the conversation back to others in the room. A good conversation isn’t one sided. Your video shouldn’t be one sided – it should speak to the needs, wants and pain points of your target audience.

You want to appeal to your audience, so you’ll need to understand them first.

Step 1: Look at your current customer base

Look for common characteristics among the people who already buy from you. Why do they buy from you and what types of problems are they solving with your product or service? Which clients bring in the most business? Who sticks around the longest? If you can find commonality within your current customer base, you can probably figure out who else you should be targeting based on those same characteristics.

It’s a good idea to develop ideal buyers or marketing personas based on this research. A persona is a fictional description of an average person in your audience to help you target your video marketing more precisely. Here’s a great article from Inc. with more information about building personas.

Step 2: Dive a little deeper

Once you have your basic personas built, you need to enrich your research. Talk to your audience – are their current customers that fit the personas you built? (there should be) Conduct interviews. Take your clients out to lunch. Ask them about their biggest concerns, their most ambitious goals, and what makes them happy. Take notes from the conversation, because your client’s natural language is a secret weapon for your video scripts — and across all your marketing collateral for that matter.

Step 3: Uncover Your Audience’s Motivation

The next step is the hardest. It’s time to uncover the emotions behind your audience’s motivation. What are they? Emotions govern everything we do, in order to have a deep understanding of your audience you need to consider them. It’s a logical extension of what you’ve discovered about your audience, which reveals something about why they feel or act a particular way. It’s likely your video will have a call to action – that’s the point right? However, your video campaign will be more successful if it’s geared toward instilling a particular emotion in your audience. An emotion that connects them to your call to action.