How to research your audience before producing an explainer video

Making an explainer video, or any kind of content, for that matter, is not just about diving into it and hoping for the best.

You should plan first, and one of the key factors to research during the planning stage, is learning about the audience you want to target.

Audience investigation is key through every digital marketing plan, as your message must be relevant, visible, and interesting. What you say is as important as how you say it, as you must capture your audience’s attention through the right message and media/format.

In this blogpost we are going to explain some of the main ways and tools to start the audience research process.

Some of these are:

Social Media listening tools

The main objective of social media listening or social media monitoring tools is to know your audience better than everyone else. This process can bring you closer to the knowledge and understanding of your customer’s behavior, trends, and sentiments. It’s all about seeking insights and tracking relevant data on a daily basis, so that you can take your message to the next level, or even change your customers perspective from negative to positive. Isn’t this amazing?  

Here are some examples of social media listening tools:

Hootsuite: Is best known for managing multiple social networks, connecting with customers, and helping your brands development and growth. This is one of the most renowned social media management and CRM tools. Its main goal is to develop one-to-one intimacy for your company’s customer engagement. Through this tool, it is easier for you to respond to any customer message or brand mentions. And it comes with digital statistics report to identify the effectiveness or your campaigns. This makes it easier for ROI optimization and (of course) business growth. Hootsuite also comes with Digital Global Overview of 2017 for understanding the changes in users behavior.  

Socialmention: If you don’t want to invest in a social media listening tool, Socialmention, is free to use. It works in real-time social media searches and analysis, “It allows you to easily track and measure what people are saying about you, your company, a new product, or any topic across the web’s social media landscape in real-time.” 

Client’s questionnaires

Jonas Salk said: “What people think of as the moment of discovery is really the discovery of the question.”. This means that to gather useful information, we must develop efficient questionnaires. When we consider our customer’s opinion, it encourages their brand fidelity and engagement. Client’s digital surveys allow a faster and cheaper gathering information process, and they are easy to use for both customers and researchers.

Here are some survey creators to help you develop an efficient digital survey. In every case, you need to choose between a paid or free program:  

SurveyMonkey: This is one of the most popular digital survey developers. It comes with quality metrics for better customer experience and completion rates, survey customization and a data program analysis for insight gathering.

Google Forms: It’s 100% free survey program developer! You have unlimited questionnaires and respondents with an easy adaptive design where you can add your personal logo, choose from a variety of theme options, and even add YouTube videos. If you have a teamwork spirit, Google Forms allow you to add collaborators. Here’s the step-by-step survey development guide.   

Google Analytics

This is one of the best-known tools made for gathering information on your website’s user behavior. This tool helps you to connect and visualize results plus save reports. It’s an invaluable source of data for any type of video you may want to create.

The most relevant information on user’s that Google Analytics provides is as follows:

• Users demographics, geographic information, navigation of behavior and interests: This allows you to visualize and analyze audience segmentation through age, gender, and other demographic information. As a result, you can develop improvements on content customization and navigation experience. You can also have a full report on user’s online and offline behavior plus channel performance.
• Optimizing results: Google Analytics works in collaboration with other Google products (such as AdSense, AdWords, AdMob). This allows you to make the most out of your results! By improving your experience with the visualization, segmentation, analysis, and data report process.
• Devices: Google Analytics has the facility to distinguish and compare between mobile, tablet and desktop traffic. You can also analyze customer’s engagement and conversion performance.

Here’s YouTube’s Google Analytics Channel for more information.

General questionnaires

General surveys are focused on general audiences, unlike client surveys where we have a clear categorization of an audience that responds to our business identity. An effective business not only focuses on customer loyalty but also on the capturing of potential new clients. As potential customers may or may not have experience with our service or products, the development of the survey should respond to this key fact. Therefore, all general questionnaires should respond to three characteristics:

• Short: An actual client can have much more to say and, has a clear interest about your service/product more than a potential user. So, each question must have an easy-answering method.  
• Planned and cost-effective: It is important to understand “what do I need to know about a general audience? Is it something specific?” If it is, you only need one or two questions to obtain the necessary information. A good question must be strategically planned.
• Have an Incentive: It’s important to give something in exchange for our customer´s time spent. An incentive can be used for both general and client questionnaires. A small gift or a discount can be a good example.

Sweepstakes

The definition of sweepstakes is as follows: “a race or contest in which the entire prize may be awarded to the winner; specifically”.

Sweepstakes and contests are a great opportunity to gather information about your audience. The prize must represent something attractive enough for users to exchange it for valuable information in your online entry. A planned and well-thought prize can guarantee an increase in your database and in website traffic (as more users that participate is equal to more visits on your site).

The questionnaire must be planned as carefully and strategically as the prize. The basic information you must gather is the following:

• Contact information such as full name, gender, birth date, address, zip code, phone and e-mail account.
• Questionnaire: This is a great opportunity for knowing your users experience or opinion about your services.  

Conclusion

Before developing your explainer video, you must research your actual and potential target audience. As we can see, there are a variety of tools that you can use for gathering effective and rich information from your users. As each company has its own identity, it has its own communication needs and goals. So you have to find the tools that suit your strategy best.  

Most marketing digital strategist’s recommend Google Analytics and Google Forms as a good start for gathering useful information. But as we were saying, it all depends on your company’s situation analysis and identity.

So the first question you need to ask yourself before making content for your audience is: Who are my potential and actual clients? What kind of information do I need to gather from them to develop an effective communication strategy? What response do I want to achieve from my audience? Do I have a clear view and understanding of my communication purposes? After that, it’s up to you!