Target Your Customers, Not Just Viewers

Target your customers, not just viewers. Study after study has asserted that video is the internet’s most effective and engaging form of content. You can get more across in one 2-3 minute video than you can in an article, a series of images or audio track. The ability for the viewer to actually watch, listen, and see how things work in real-time is simply invaluable to marketers.

The Right Views

Even with everything video content has going for it: You can’t just make a video and expect the right people to watch it. That’s right. It’s not just about views. It’s about the right views. Views from people who have the potential to become a customer or partner for your business.

When planning and creating your video content, you need to have a very specific target in mind. Identifying your target audience should be the first step you take when you begin video marketing. You don’t just want to target random viewers; you want to target your customers. Those are the people who will ultimately convert into buyers after seeing your videos. The rest of the viewers? They’re just gravy – at best top-of-funnel prospects.

Four Steps to Identify Your Target

Here are the steps you should take to identifying your target audience for your videos, helping you to separate potential customers from mere viewers.

#1 Don’t make assumptions

Assumptions do have their place in business and even in marketing, but you can’t base your entire targeting strategy around assumptions. You may start with assumptions about your target audience and then test those assumptions using real-world data. That’s how you’ll get the most accurate results.

Some businesses guess about who they should target and don’t even think about real-world data. That’s an excellent way to make costly mistakes. Forget how you think your audience should look. Find evidence that proves how your audience looks.

We recommend using past clients to determine what your ideal profile is and build our your target market from there. I wrote a blog post on it a few years back, and I use to give a presentation on the subject based on this Prezi. The long and short of it is, use past clients to determine what types of companies you work best with and who is buying the projects or products are the best for your business. Use these clients as a jumping-off point build our your ideal client profile.

#2 Design an Ideal Client Profile

If you haven’t already designed an ideal client profile for your target audience, now is the time to do so. This persona will outline what traits the typical audience member has. A good customer persona should include crucial information about not only their characteristics but also the buying situations that may prompt them to purchase your product.

In other words, you should list buying situations based on the benefit your customer is seeking. For instance, quality service, usage rates, product features, and whether they are a non-user, light-user, or heavy-user. There are many databases and market research tools available to you to help you complete this research.

You’ll quickly come up with many customer characteristics as well, including gender, age, location, household size, lifestyle factors, and marital status. Start with one. As you develop additional campaigns you will, more than likely, want to create multiple buyer personas.

#3 Get on social media

If you are at a loss for what to make your videos about or if you find yourself publishing videos with a lack of confidence that your audience is going to engage with it, social media can be your most powerful tool.

Social media is a fantastic place to find people who fit your customer persona (and those already in your audience) and figure out their pain points and interests. Tracking these points will allow you to research ideas that answer the questions and address the challenges of your target market.

Ask a question about a video subject you are considering. By throwing it out there on social media channels, you can learn a lot about what your audience thinks. If Question #1 garners a list of passionate responses and Question #2 gets the silent treatment, you have just identified an important subject to your target market. Use it.

You can also keep up with what people are saying about you and, perhaps more importantly, your competitors. Social media channels are also a great place to study how your competitors interact with the audience.

Native tools like Facebook Analytics and third-party platforms like Hootsuite can be used to monitor all the interactions people have with your brand on social media. And Google Analytics can then be used to track how they behave on your website.

#4 Monitor for Results

When it comes to monitoring your target audience and how they are engaging with your video content, Facebook and YouTube both provide fantastic tools for doing so. The analytics will help you understand who’s watching the videos, which will help you determine if you are targeting the right people after all (and successfully engaging them). Stats like likes and subscribes will tell you if they felt you offered value to them.

When you publish Facebook Live videos, you’ll get to see what parts of the video engaged people the most through shares, follows, likes, and comments. That can be a compelling lesson so that you can tailor future content around these stats.

Conclusion

Views are nice, but speaking to and reaching your target market is the key to video marketing success. Like many functions of business, it pays to plan. A video marketing campaign created with a target market in mind will outperform one (where it matters) that is designed to engage the masses.

For other planning tips for your video campaign download The Video Marketing Strategy Blueprint available in pdf or on the web. It is a quick, actionable guide to planning or refining your video marketing campaign.

If you have any questions and would like to discuss more, feel free to shoot me an email at neil@nickelcitygraphics.com or set up a time to chat.

Unlocking Your Ability to Create Powerful, Professional Video Content

If you had to create an engaging, professional video for your business today, could you pull it off? If you’re like many consultants and other business professionals, you’d probably feel completely overwhelmed. Even finding a starting point might seem impossible. And that’s frustrating, because you know if you want to grow your business, video is an essential part of your marketing, sales, and communications strategies.

What you don’t know, though, is how to easily create videos that:
❓ Strengthen your brand
❓ Establish your authority, and
❓ Make people want to do business with you.

That’s the problem we help solve. We have created the vidwheel Creator Network,  a community where entrepreneurs and consultants representing all industries can come together to master the simple steps to stabilize and grow your business through video. From strategy to audio and lighting, staging, preparation, to feeling 100% natural in front of the camera, here’s where you can learn it all. I created the vidwheel Creator Network as a supportive, energizing place to learn, share feedback, and grow alongside a community of professionals a lot like you!

Our affordable membership package even includes a done-for-you equipment kit. A video studio-in-a-box for your home or office. We’ve curated these kits for simplicity, versatility, and video creation power. No guesswork. No bins full of equipment you bought but didn’t need.

It’s the trifecta of video mastery:
✅ Right training
✅ Right equipment
✅ Right community

That’s the kind of ease I wish I had when I started my own small business.

If this sounds like what you’ve been looking for, please take a moment to check out the vidwheel Creator Network.