Adding effective video content to your strategy can overhaul engagement and expand your reach in most marketing pushes. The key operative word there, however, is effective.
Making effective marketing videos—or any kind of marketing content, for that matter—takes more than just diving head first and hoping for the best!
Even when you have extensive expertise in your field, understanding your target audience via audience research is crucial for creating content that resonates. Otherwise, you risk working hard to develop an amazing piece that nobody cares to watch!
So, in this article, we’ll go over a few different approaches and tools you can use to get a better sense of who you are making your content for and see how you can translate that information into more compelling—and effective—videos for your next video marketing push.
Leveraging the Data You Already Have: A Goldmine of Insights
Whether you are following in the footsteps of experienced animation companies to make a lovely explainer or trying to make a mindblowing live-action product video for your new campaign, data-backed decision making is crucial to help you make content that delivers results!
So, before jumping into new and unfamiliar methodologies and outside sources, it usually pays off to try and tap into the wealth of data that most marketers and business owners likely already have at their disposal.
Namely, take another (or deeper) look into your website and social media analytics to get a better sense of who you are talking to with your marketing content.
Tracking website visitors helps you see how people move through your site, which pages grab their attention, and where they drop off. This kind of insight can point you toward better video topics and formats that keep them watching.
Website Analytics
Website analytics platforms—like Google Analytics—can be powerful, versatile, and often free tools to access a treasure trove of information about your website visitors.
And while different platforms will provide any number of different data points and quantitative references, there are a few core ones included by most that you’ll pay special attention to: demographics, interests, and behavior.
- Demographics: these data points form the foundation of your audience profile. Covering potentially vital aspects like average age or age ranges, location, and gender should be points of consideration way in advance of conceptualizing your next marketing video.
- Interests: Just knowing which of your site's pages gets the most visits can reveal a lot about the people visiting your site. Taking note of where they go and what they pay attention to communicates the topics that interest them and thus can help you hone in on relevant topics for your content.
- Behavior: Most analytic platforms have a section about content consumption behavior, usually displaying metrics like average session duration and bounce rates, as well as how engaged your visitors are by what you have to say on those pages. You can use data points like these to inform the formatting and length choices for your videos in ways that mirror what is working on your site (and avoid what isn't!).
Social Media Analytics
Taking a closer, more insightful look at how your audience engages with your social media presence can also offer a lot of valuable data through those platform’s built-in analytic reporting tools.
- Insights metrics: Social media tools like Facebook Insights can provide a host of information on how your audience spends their time on those platforms. Delivering detailed data ranging from your followers’ age ranges, locations, and even their interests.
- Engagement metrics: These let you analyze how your audience interacts with your existing content. Data points like the number of shares and comments for different videos and topics can help you understand what they prefer or are most interested in.
- Content metrics: Analyzing how your existing content performs on video-centric platforms like YouTube can tell you the type of video they gravitate towards (short vs. long, tutorial vs. commercial, etc.), pointing you in the right direction from the get-go.
By leveraging your existing sources of information on the specific audience you are trying to connect with, you can establish some solid, data-backed foundations with which to work. This will help you better define who your video is for and start building around the things you already know they prefer.
Digging Deeper with Qualitative Research: The Stories Behind the Data
While your website and social media analytics give you an excellent place to start your audience research efforts, data alone can only do so much.
Qualitative research lets you delve deeper into your audience’s preferences and key motivators, which will help you paint a fuller picture of who they are and what they want from you to better customize delicate marketing pushes, like a new product launch or the start of a big campaign.
Targeted Surveys, Polls, and Interviews
Crafting meaningful surveys and polls tailored to gather audience insights can go a long way to inform the more nuanced aspects of your video production efforts.
While how much (or how little) information and participation you can expect from your audience will vary from brand to brand, you can focus on three core pieces of information you’ll want to prioritize asking about.
- Topic preferences: Using open-ended questions around relevant topics that tie to both your products or industry and your audience's pain points can be resource-intensive to parse through. However, you also can get invaluable feedback that lets you hone in on the specific information you should cover in your videos.
- Length and style preferences: The style of your video is crucial, as it often directly influences if someone decides to even look at your video. Length is another vital differentiating factor, as different lengths will help (or hinder) the effectiveness of your content.
- Platform preferences: While using whatever data you have from your website and socials gives you a perfect place to start modeling your audience research profile, expansion and reach are at the core of every marketing push. Figuring out early on the platforms your audience favors can dramatically improve your content’s eventual effectiveness as it lets you mold your content for those platforms from the get-go.
Social Media Listening Tools
Social media platforms are often your best source for direct feedback and unfiltered audience sentiment. While we already talked about checking your social metrics to get started, you can then expand and try to mine these sites for even more involved and valuable information.
- Hashtag and Conversation Monitoring: Tracking prominent hashtags and conversations tied to your brand, products, and industry on platforms like X and Instagram can help you learn a whole lot of useful information about your audience. From the topics they gravitate toward to the types of videos that resonate with them—the ones they share—there are a lot of useful insights you can glean from paying attention to the social media chatter.
- Social Listening Tools: There are plenty of tools online, free and otherwise, that are specifically designed to help you parse through and extract valuable insights from social platforms. Some even include advanced features like demographic and sentiment analysis—all of which can go a long way to help you understand who your video is for and also make better production choices as you develop them.
Learning From The Best: Analyzing Successful Video Strategies in Your Niche
Analyzing the right metrics and paying attention to the conversation in the digital places where your audience hangs out will set your audience research up for success—giving you a keener sense of what these people look for and the things you should cater to.
But there’s another angle of approach that teaches you about these things while also helping you expand and inspire ideas for your upcoming video project: industry-wide research.
Identifying Key Players to Pay Attention To
Breaking down and analyzing what other leading brands and content creators operating in your niche are doing in terms of video marketing can be enlightening. Often delivering valuable insights you can’t get anywhere else. Fortunately, there are a few good sources online you can mine for this type of information.
- Industry Leaders: Your first stop should be to identify a set of established brands in your industry that have a particularly strong video marketing game. Make sure to include the biggest and most active brand in your niche, regardless of the scope of their marketing, as long as they target a similar type of audience as you.
- Direct Competitors: Depending on the size and scope of your operation, you'll likely have more direct competitors than these industry-leading brands. At this stage, it's also worth pinpointing who these companies are, as you'll want to keep an eye on their content marketing strategies as well.
- Emerging Players: Last but certainly not least, you'll also want to identify whatever up-and-comers are popping up on the scene and successfully making a name for themselves. We live in a world of digital innovation and disruptive marketing, so keeping an eye on both ends of the spectrum can potentially give an edge to your audience research efforts.
Analyzing Your Competition’s Video Strategies
Once you know who to pay attention to and why, it’s time to start gathering useful data. This process can be as involved or as cursory as your time and needs dictate, but here are a few core aspects you might want to prioritize looking into:
- Content Format: Pay attention to the type of videos these brands are putting out regularly. Are they releasing mostly explainer videos? Focusing on product demos? Maybe a mix of both with some testimonials on the side?
- Video Length and Style: Analyze the average length their content runs for, but keep in mind different types of videos usually shoot for different target lengths. You should also make notes on the editing style they favor in their content; do they tend to make fast-paced videos or take a more methodical approach? That sort of thing.
- Performance Metrics: Closely monitor whatever engagement metrics you can access from these videos. Things like the number of Likes, comment sentiment, and the number of shares their videos are getting.
- Platform Distribution: Make note of the platform or platforms these companies use to reach out to their audiences and distribute their video content (Company websites, social media platforms, YouTube, etc.)
Drawing Strategic Insights and Key Takeaways
Once you know who to pay attention to and have started gathering data on their video strategy, you have all you need to actually get some useful intel on how their content resonates with their audiences. Use whatever you find out to improve your own video marketing strategy and inform your decision-making moving forward.
- Defining Strengths and Weaknesses: You can learn a great deal by analyzing what these companies are producing for their video marketing pushes and, most importantly, how their audiences are responding to their approaches. This will help you identify aspects you can emulate (strengths) and areas where you can improve (weaknesses) to give your own strategy and edge.
- Content Gaps: It's also a good idea to look for relevant topics or audience-appealing content formats your competitors might be neglecting. These types of oversights can give you powerful opportunities to fill gaps in your market and attract new segments of your target audience.
- Adapt, Iterate, and Improve: trying to simply copy what your competition is doing is often a fool's errand. Instead, as you work on your audience research, always look to learn from their successes and mistakes and translate those lessons into your own strategy in ways that synergize with your brand's unique strengths to produce content your segment of the audience will gravitate toward.
Key Takeaways for Audience Research
Creating compelling marketing videos that resonate with potential customers or the people you can appeal to is vital to unlocking the full potential of your video marketing efforts. But before diving headfirst into production, it always pays off to take the time to do thorough audience research.
Hopefully, after reading this far, you’ve picked up more than a few new tools and strategies to gather valuable and accurate insights into the people you are making content for and are better equipped to conduct audience research in ways that translate into better videos!
From leveraging website and social media analytics to conducting surveys and analyzing competitor strategies, you now have a roadmap to understand your audience’s preferences, pain points, and content consumption habits.
By prioritizing audience research, you can ensure your video content is not only informative but also engaging, leading to increased conversions and a stronger connection with the people interested in what you have to offer!
