Determining your target audience is crucial for any successful marketing campaign.
Discussing the target audience is a key part of our process every time we create an animated explainer video. When it comes to creating the most impactful video messaging, knowing your audience is everything.
Clearly identifying your audience makes it possible to tailor your video to their goals and preferences. This leads to higher engagement and more effective communication – aka, a more successful video, and overall campaign.
Read on to explore our practical advice on how to determine your target audience.
Our award-winning process prioritizes discovering your target audience, every time. Learn more about our process above.
Tip #1: Use Market Research to Get Clues
Analyzing your industry can be a fruitful place to begin the work of determining your target audience.
Studying consumer trends, conducting market research, and searching for patterns among key demographics can lead you towards a clearer picture of who your target audience is.
This video we created with AARP outlines the importance of audience research and management. In this context, audience research helps AARP provide meaningful services to a diverse community of members.
You can utilize tools like surveys, interviews, and social media analytics to gather valuable insights. You may discover potential untapped audiences, or understand more clearly what audiences are looking for out of your industry.
Tip #2: Analyze Existing Customers
Reviewing your existing customer base is foundational when defining your target audience.
Begin by identifying common characteristics among your most loyal and satisfied customers. Look for patterns related to age, gender, location, industry, and job title. This analysis will help you refine your understanding of your target audience and align your animated explainer videos accordingly.
Tip #3: Build Buyer Personas
Once you have gathered customer data, it’s time to create buyer personas. A buyer persona is a fictional representation of your ideal customer.
Remember, you probably will have a handful of different buyer personas that represent different types of clients in your industry. Each of your clients doesn’t have to fit squarely into these boxes – they are simply models to help you step into the shoes of your audience.
Buyer personas can include details such as demographics, interests, goals, challenges, and motivations.
Refer back to what you create every time you make marketing decisions: putting yourself in the mindset of each persona can help you hone in on how best to appeal to them with the various strategies in your toolbelt.
Different audiences require different strategies, even when marketing the same product.
Try to determine the differences in this series we created with Clark Construction, designed to advertise their product Infinite Facade to three difference audience groups.
Tip #4: Leverage Advanced Analytics and Metrics
There are many online tools to help you reflect on the granular performance of your marketing efforts.
Platforms like YouTube, Vimeo, or Wistia all offer detailed analytics on video performance, broken down into audience segments. This type of feedback can provide valuable information about your viewers.
Pay attention to metrics such as view duration, engagement rates, and audience retention among segments that vary in demographics. This data will give you a better understanding of which segments of your target audience are responding positively to your videos.
Tip #5: Refine and Test
Determining your target audience is an ongoing process. As you gain more experience and data, you can return to the buyer personas you’ve created and make them even stronger.
- Collect feedback from your viewers through surveys or comments on your videos.
- Use A/B testing to compare different versions of your videos and measure their impact on engagement and conversions.
- Try new, out of the box ideas and see how your audience responds (animated learning module, anyone?)
We’ve created unique marketing services projects for a variety of clients, and we love brainstorming on out of the box ideas to help get your message across.
Defining a target audience is crucial for the success of your campaign. By investing time and effort into research, defining buyer personas, leveraging analytics, and staying committed to testing and refinement, you’ll be able to create videos that resonate with your intended audience, increase engagement, and drive positive business outcomes.
