Why understanding your target audience is the key to brand engagement

Videos can be an incredibly persuasive marketing medium which help to develop a genuine emotional bonds between a brand and its customers while simultaneously driving up sales. But with so much information out there on the internet, there will always be competition for attention in a saturated market. These days, high-quality video production is the standard, but even good ideas and great production aren’t enough on their own to get the job done. Intimately understanding your target demographic is key to producing the right kind of video content. Using some basic psychological concepts can increase the chances of driving the message home to the target consumer.

Getting to know your target audience

Choose the right medium

Video is a creative and effective medium, but it is not necessarily always the best medium for getting a message across. While there’s room for every company to incorporate video into their overall marketing strategy, it’s important to be thoughtful about the type of video you choose to highlight your brand. Remember, you want to share an authentic story that evokes empathy and inspires action. From explainer videos and documentaries to founder videos and original content, capitalize on the type of video that best conveys who you are, and that will resonate with your audience. Here are 7 types of videos that can be integrated into any marketing plan.

Play to their emotions

Once you’ve figured out which kind of video best suits your brand, it’s time to establish some emotional goals for the project. While we like to think of ourselves as rational beings, the truth is that emotions play a much larger role in our decision-making than calm and reasoned logic, especially when it comes to purchasing decisions. That’s because emotions hit us at our most instinctive level. Even if we don’t know consciously why we’re buying something, we do know whether or not it makes us feel good to do it.

The key to capitalizing on emotional response is to have goals for the content from the get-go. Defining these goals can be as simple as answering two basic questions:

  1. What actions do I want my target audience to perform after watching this video?
  2. What emotions do I want to elicit?

Know what it is that makes the target audience tick and put it to work in your favor, without being too heavy-handed. If the story and its emotional content doesn’t feel authentic, you run the risk of alienating them instead. Recent studies show that brands that can successfully create a strong emotional connection with their customers outperform their competitors by as much as 85% in overall sales growth. So what we’re saying is, playing to your audience’s emotions can pay off if you do it well.

The shareability factor

You’ve got a shiny new video, ready to share with the world. Now what? You can push this content until you’re blue in the face, but it doesn’t mean a thing unless people are sharing it. What is it that motivates people to share content? Why unicorn poop? Why cat videos? It’s because, for whatever reason, these videos elicit a strong emotional response in their viewers.  Whether that emotion is hilarity, anger, outrage, or schadenfreude, capitalizing on high-arousal emotions like these can give any video the “it” factor it needs.

Intimately knowing your audience is the answer. A video doesn’t have to go viral, but it does have to strike a chord with the intended demographic. Your small corner of the internet can have a big impact on your business if it’s properly executed. Whether you’re trying to make your customers laugh, learn, or empathize, being deliberate about the emotional goals for content is non-negotiable. Start with a strong vision, take a creative angle, and know the audience well, and your video will hit home with the right people, every time.