Appealing to Your Target Audience

In making any type of corporate video, you need to think about who is going to be seeing it.  The function that your video is serving, your target age demographic, and other identifying factors such as client occupation or budget can greatly affect what you choose to produce and how, so it’s absolutely essential that you know your target audience.

Avenues of Release

The way that you choose to share your video will hugely impact what types of people see it.  For younger demographics, social media is typically a great way to share content, but even then you have to think about what platforms you should be sharing content on.  Facebook appeals to a wide variety of ages, but other sites such as LinkedIn or Pinterest tend to appeal to an older demographic.  If your demographic is older still, then the internet may not be the correct route to go, and advertising on more widely accessible outlets will behoove you.  Choosing how you share your video is a big factor in making sure that it’s being seen by the right people.

Tone

The tone that you use in talking to your audience obviously depends on your line of work, but it’s also affected by the demographic that you’d like to reach and what the most effective way to do that is.  For younger audiences, relating on a comedic and light-hearted level is a typically safe and successful route.  Older clients are more receptive to videos that speak to the human experience or elicit feelings of nostalgia.  Trying to make your product appealing to senior citizens through memes is probably going to fall flat, whereas that tactic could be very lucrative when trying to appeal to teens or young adults.

Length

The length of your corporate video also dictates who will see your video and, perhaps more importantly, how long they’ll actually watch it for.  This can really just be a matter of attention span.  If you’ve ever watched a cartoon as an adult that you used to watch as a child, it may appear to be much shorter than you remember.  When you were a kid, watching the same story for 15 minutes was fulfilling.  Not only did you feel entertained, but satisfied as well.  Adult television shows usually run for about an hour, sometimes two depending on the nature of the show.  This exemplifies how the length of your video correlates with the demographic you’re trying to appeal to.

Knowing your audience is the first step in knowing how to speak to them. Video production and marketing can have similar results like web advertising, social media, and search engine optimization.   Paying close attention to how you’re presenting yourself and what you’re presenting will be time consuming to begin with, but will make your business easier to operate and more successful in the long run.