How To Research Your Audience To Make Engaging Video Content

Updated: August 4, 2023

Understanding viewers psychology isn't just a college prerequisite. It's the essence of marketing.

Speaking to your audience in their own language and standing out from your competitors starts before you begin your video’s production.

It begins with your audience research and how good a job you do actively gathering data to translate your insights into meaningful content.

Planning and research are key from the get-go, and conducting effective marketing research during the planning stage is essential to understand your audience’s behavior. Creating an FAQ video, commercial, whiteboard video, or any other type of video content, for that matter, is not about diving in and hoping for the best.

Establishing emotional connections with your audience translates into engagement, starting by determining your goal and target audience.

You should have the right tools to maximize productivity when gathering data.

In this piece, we will review some of the most effective tools to conduct audience research, so you can produce a video that lets them know YOU understand THEM.

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Social Media Listening is a keyword-based tool that allows you to gain valuable insights into your online brand activities. It uses a two-step process of monitoring and analyzing data. While Social media monitoring takes part in collecting data, Social Media Listening answers what’s behind the collected information.

There is a lot of things you can learn by using a tool like SML that can directly impact your content’s performance:

Improving customer relations: Identifying conversations as an opportunity for user engagement and tracking the feelings and opinions about your brand. A successful company hears what the audience has to say and responds accordingly. From someone who likes your brand to someone who complains about it, all the buzz should be considered. Also, identifying frequent comments or questions gives you an opportunity to plan future content they will be interested in.

Find and attract potential users: You can even steal users from your competitors by analyzing their behavior and opinions. If they have a problem with your competitors, you can focus your video on showing that your product can provide a better solution.

User content: User-generated content spurs naturally as you build trust and foster brand advocates. Incorporating user-generated content into your videos can effectively generate positive feedback and loyal users and increase the conversation rate.

Real-time strategy: This tool can make your strategy flexible over time. It allows you to identify user behavior in relation to your content and understand what triggered a reaction from users. Whether positive or negative, you can adapt your content strategy accordingly.

Learn about your competitors: You can analyze your competitor's behavior and inform your content based on how the audience reacts to what they do.

Want a bit more detail on Social Media Monitoring? We’ve got your back.

2. Client’s questionnaires

Surveys are a great way for brands to collect helpful information from existing customers. Allowing your clients to provide feedback on product or service satisfaction, company image and reputation, and product/service development.

Every questionnaire development should have meaningful and measurable results, the goal being to use open and closed question styles to gather as much information as possible.

Close-ended questions are analyzed through quantitative methods, while open-ended questions are analyzed through qualitative methods. Open-ended questions allow customers to freely communicate their opinion; this is usually where insights to inform your videos are found.

There are popular tools like SurveyMonkey, Zonka Feedback and many other alternative tools to conduct formal surveys. But nowadays, you can even use the Question Sticker on Instagram to have an instant answer to a specific question from your existing users!

3. Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a free and powerful platform that allows you to study users' behaviors and preferences, which can help you clarify which strategy works best for each segmented audience.

Having at your disposal a global web of analytics reports helps with obtaining quantitative and qualitative data such as acquisition, behavior, audience, real-time, and conversion. As well as audience data (demographics, location, device, gender, age, technology, tastes, and interests) to develop a user profile.

To create great content, you must analyze the person, not just the channels or devices they use. When used right, Google Analytics lets you do just that. Anticipating where customers will appear and the messages they want to hear.

If you want to start employing this resource, you can use Google Data Studio, which allows you to create reports using Google Analytics data through many visual resources.

4. Sweepstakes

Sweepstakes are promotional schemes in which prizes are given to winners selected only by chance from the entries received. There’s no purchase required as a condition to participate, but there should be rules to do so. The prize should be attractive enough to attract and encourage people to participate.

Sweepstakes can be an amazing tool for marketing research as long as you commit to the execution.

The process and prize are related to your brand’s identity, and you must have clear, predetermined goals to understand whether the results are successful. Using sweepstakes to motivate people to participate, you can launch user preferences and trend monitoring efforts.

It is also relevant that the sweepstake design is as attractive as the prize, as that’s what users see at first sight. If you have more than 4 gifts in mind, it’s a great opportunity to make distinct sweepstakes with different goals to measure performance.

In Summary

According to a report from HubSpot, more than 50% of consumers want to see videos from brands compared to any other type of content.

But just producing video content without a clear endgame is usually a waste of time. Carrying out successful and profitable audience research is key to consistent and relevant video content.

Before settling for the type of video you want to develop, you should choose your marketing research tools wisely.

Some can be used for user behavior knowledge, others for users' demographic and psychographic characteristics. But audience research is a key element of every video production company’s process.

The tools we discuss will help your business stand out by offering meaningful and useful video content for your actual and potential clients.