Any marketing whether it be video marketing or otherwise will miss the mark if you have no idea who you’re trying to reach with your message.

So – the critical first step when you’re getting started with video marketing for your business is to find your target audience, and be super clear on who you are creating your content for.

And that’s exactly what I’ll be helping you do in this video.

One of my favourite tools for audience research is Tube Buddy – give it a try here today https://www.engagevideomarketing.com/tubebuddy​

To really uncover your target audience you need to be putting yourself in your customer’s shoes, and consider what might be going through their heads at the key touch points they could potentially have with your brand. The fact is that the more you can know your customer, the deeper you understand their needs, the more effective your video strategy can be.

Building a deep understanding of your audience is critical to understanding not only how you’re going to be talking to them through video, the language you may use and so on, but also what sort of content they’re likely to engage with. Your target audience’s age, gender, interests, habits, geographical location and more all influence their online viewing engagement behaviours and are one of the most important elements to consider as part of an effective online video strategy.

There are 3 levels to this, in order to really understand your target audience. Demographics, psychographics and behaviour profiling. Let me break down each of these with some questions you can ask in each section.

First up – you need to be clear on their demographics. This is the surface level stuff such as age, gender, occupation, family situation, household income and so on…

The trick here is to be super clear, and aim to identify specifics here, not wide generalizations such as “they’re a 30-50 year old male, in a professional job with $80 – $100K a year income”.

Instead – be specific, make it a description of a potentially ‘real’ person such as “He’s a 32 year old male, who is a secondary school maths teacher making $72K a year… and so on”

By being clear on the demographics and making them specific you are starting to paint a picture of a potentially real customer, not some vague representation of a faceless audience.

After demographics, it’s time to go inwards and consider the psychographics of your target audience. That is… the stuff that’s going on between their ears. Whether they are conscious of it or not.

You need to consider questions such as…

What goals, aspirations or desires does your audience have?

What pain or frustrations are they feeling?

What emotions are they feeling that motivates them to buy from you?

What fires them up? Makes them excited or makes them mad?

By getting to the heart of your target audience with these questions you’ll begin to really understand how to show up for them with your video content, and importantly how to hold their attention and move them to action.

And finally – we need to take some time to profile our audience’s behaviours online so we can be strategic with our video marketing and reach them in the right place at the right time.

Behaviour profiling then – is about getting clear on things like; How do your ideal customers interact online? What platforms or type of content do they engage with? What time of day or day of week is best for engaging with those people? What action are they likely to take after engaging with your content online?

Properly understanding your target audience is an often overlooked but hugely important aspect of your video marketing strategy. By taking the time to really get to know your audience and develop an intimate knowledge of their needs, desires, pains and motivators, you’ll have an understanding of what language to use when communicating with them. AND you’ll get insight into what stories to tel, or information to sharel that will cut through the ‘fog’ and allow your message to speak directly to them.

The truth is that people buy from people. Your audience is REAL PEOPLE and it is important never to forget that when defining a strategy.

I hope that’s been helpful my friend, and I want to hear from you in the comments. Who’s your target audience? And how well do you know them?