How to find the right audience for your video marketing campaigns

Summary

Identifying the right audience is a fundamental requirement for the effectiveness and success of video marketing campaigns for brands of all types.

But where to start? The key word is one: data.

The secret of the most effective marketing is all in a formula: the right message, conveyed by the right means, addressed to the right target.

It all sounds easy. In practice, it’s much less so, and we’re sure that all professionals in the sector know this perfectly well. It’s even more so today: digital transformation has accelerated and made all processes more fluid. Changes are continuous and sometimes sudden. And marketers, as a result, are forced to constantly adapt, rethink, and recalibrate their strategies.

Be careful, though: if the variables have multiplied, so have the opportunities. It’s all about knowing how to seize them. To do this, first and foremost, you need to keep your eyes and mind wide open.

But that’s not enough. In the midst of the whirlwind of change, it’s good to have some fixed points, which once again concern the message (i.e. content), the means and the target.

As far as the means are concerned: here we already have one certainty. And it is this: in the digital ecosystem, the medium that ensures the best results in terms of attention, ease of use, and involvement is undoubtedly video.

We have dedicated many posts to the strategies for building the best video marketing campaigns, dissecting data and statistics that leave no room for uncertainty.

Now, however, we want to focus on another element, which in many ways is the most decisive. We’re talking about the target audience. Once again, in this field, digital has changed everything.

The compass of Big Data for video marketing campaigns

When it comes to digital marketing, there is a fundamental link that must always be kept in mind: that between data and people.

Data is the compass with which to orientate ourselves; it’s the digital traces that allow us to get to know the recipients of our messages, our campaigns and our strategies in greater depth. And, consequently, to package them in an increasingly effective and winning way.

Here’s an impressive statistic: last year alone, every single human being generated an average of 1.7 megabytes of data per second (techjury.net).

So, first of all, it’s about learning how to collect these huge masses of information, analyze it in the most intelligent and functional way, and interpret it with the support of artificial intelligence and Machine Learning systems that are constantly updated.

But let’s get even more specific. And let’s start from the basics, with the technical definition of Big Data established by Gartner:

“Big data is high-volume, high-velocity and/or high-variety information assets that demand cost-effective, innovative forms of information processing that enable enhanced insight, decision making, and process automation.”

Translating into a simpler and more operational language: Big Data is the digital traces that we all disseminate online and that companies collect to improve their processes.

How many types of data exist?

There are many, it all depends on the degree of detail you want to adopt. But you can still isolate some macro-categories, which are very useful; here they are:

• Behavioral Data: This is the data based on users’ web surfing behaviors, based on so-called “cookies.”. There is a lot of information that can be extracted from here: websites visited, page views, time spent on a page, bounce rate, scroll modes; and then clicks on links, downloads made, completion of any video views…and much more.
• Contextual Data: Here, we are in a large field that concerns the context, the environment that surrounds a user or a customer: it goes from news, to weather forecasts (think about how fundamental they can be, for example, for the tourism sector), to road traffic, market fluctuations, geopolitics…and these are just a few examples.
• Demographic Data: everything related to age, gender, marital status, household composition, but also the income of any user.
• Geographic Data: that is, geolocation. It is a key topic, especially for certain types of business, that is getting a big boost related to Proximity Marketing.
• Psychographic Data: in some ways, this is the information that may seem most elusive. However, it’s also some of the most valuable information for businesses today. We’re talking about people’s behaviors, beliefs, values, interests, and lifestyles that can be inferred from their online data.

As we mentioned, there are many more categories. Above all, the same “digital places” where you can find this data are multiplying…think about social networks, but also the ongoing IoT (Internet of things) revolution.

The discussion could go on and on. But we want to move on, as promised, to how to find the right audience for video marketing campaigns.

The Starting Point: Buyer Personas

The starting point for effective video marketing campaigns is to identify schematic models of customers who may be interested in your brand, your products, and your services. These are called Buyer Personas.

According to Hubspot, a Buyer Persona is a “semi-fictional representation of your ideal buyer based on data, interviews, and some educated guesses. Essentially, it’s a definition of your ideal buyer presented in such a way that it sounds like it’s talking about a specific person.”

We’re still at a rather abstract level. But, even here, we see how the word “data” pops up again.

So, it’s a matter of integrating hypotheses, ideas, and creativity(perhaps the result of intense brainstorming among marketing teams) with factual feedback based on concrete and detailed information.

Beware: the results of this preliminary phase cannot and should not be fixed. They are models that you must be ready to change, even quickly, based on evidence that may emerge later…and, of course, based on the measurable results of your video marketing campaigns.

The decisive shift to segmentation

From the models, which remain an essential starting point, we now move to a more concrete and decisive aspect: the segmentation of your target.

The days of the one-size-fits-all message are over.

An elderly professional from New York, in fact, surely has preferences, behaviors, and desires that are very different from those of a young university student from Paris.

How, then, can we address these very different targets in an equally effective way with video marketing campaigns?

The answer lies in personalization; but even before that, in segmentation.

Starting from the collection of data of actual and potential customers, clusters of people with homogeneous and consistent characteristics are identified, to be targeted with tailor-made video marketing campaigns.

In short: it’s no longer about a single indiscriminate target, but more specific micro-targets. Until you get to individuals…on which we conclude this post.

The ultimate boost for video marketing campaigns? Personalization

We’ve seen how the time of the one-size-fits-all is definitely over and how effective target segmentation is for any type of video communication campaign.

However, there is one more step that can be taken. From one-to-many you can move to a truly one-to-one perspective.

Let’s talk about personalization: the ultimate boost for video marketing campaigns.

With personalization, the target becomes the individual, with their unique and unrepeatable characteristics, behaviors, and desires. Characteristics, behaviors, and desires that, again, are reconstructed from data.

The next step is to create real personalized videos, built with a tailored point of view, as if they were custom-made suits. All of this is now made possible by specialized platforms like Babelee.

But that’s not all: Babelee’s personalized videos are also interactive, so they adapt in real time to the navigation choices of each individual user. In this way, in addition to one-to-many, a second rigid paradigm is broken: that of the one-way message.

Thanks to interactivity, video marketing campaigns are becoming bi-directional, they are increasingly becoming a fruitful opportunity for exchange, a real dialog between the client and the company, with enormous advantages on both fronts!

Finally, there’s one last aspect to consider: that of continuous improvement. Building your video marketing campaigns in a customized, data-driven manner allows you to gather surgical information regarding results. And understanding what worked and what didn’t is the only way to constantly increase the quality, effectiveness, and success of your strategies.