How to Target Your Audience By Creating Niche Video Content

One of the most common mistakes in an online video strategy is messaging that is too broad. These days, smart audiences are on the hunt for more narrow niche video content.

They're spending a lot of time watching online videos and are hungry for more content in every part of the conversion process. Here are three ways to target specific audiences with niche content.

Identify the Primary Audience

Before starting any video campaign, establish the primary audience for your content. It's easy to fall into the habit of saying "let's make a one-size fits all video for everyone." The truth is that this strategy is not going to get you the results you're after.

Take the time and identify if your audience is, for example, existing customers, potential new customers, investors, an internal audience, the general public, B2B, B2C, future employees, or someone who is completely unfamiliar with your company. Pick one audience and keep it in mind for every part of the process, including pre-production, production, post, distribution, and marketing.

Every step along the way will play a big role in how your messaging is received by the viewers—the creative direction, script, talent, and overall tone of your video. Always keep in mind the age and demographic of your audience and how it prefers to receive information.
One of the next important steps when crafting your niche video is determining the most effective call-to-action. What do you want this viewer to do? Do you want them to make a purchase, get more information, sign up for something, subscribe, share the video?

One huge tip for reaching external consumers: Think about the storyline of your content. Most online viewers are already bombarded with advertisements, so try to demonstrate how your product or company can offer a solution to this audience's problems. Focus on the pain points and create visual stories around them rather than creating flat-out commercials.

The call-to-action is going to be different for each audience, and some of this may depend on the abilities of your distribution platform (as discussed in the next section).

Identify and Master the Platform

You shouldn't necessarily publish the same video to multiple platforms because it's not effective when you're trying to target viewers. In most cases, a company website is a different experience than social video platforms such as YouTube, Facebook, Periscope, and Instagram.

Publishers should know exactly where their video is going to be distributed early on in the planning process. This can determine how an online video is produced. Each video should be tailored to the platform, so it's crucial to know what works and, more importantly, what doesn't.

Thinking back to your primary audience, where are they and how are they going to see that video? They may not be on your website yet because they may not know about your solutions, for example. Maybe they're using some of the social platforms mentioned earlier and you have an opportunity to grab them with an informational and entertaining piece of promoted content marketing. Even if they are using multiple platforms, that doesn't mean you need to publish your video to every one. Pick one or more that is going to complement the goal of your niche video campaign.

Once you have completed your research and chosen a destination or destinations, you'll need to master those platforms and know their features and limitations. For example, maybe you'd like to use one of the clickable button features on YouTube such as annotations or cards. If so, then knowing this ahead of time can help when you're scripting and shooting your video.

The same can be applied toward another online video platform you may using on your company website. Are there any features you can build into the video that will lead you to the goal of that campaign? Can other assets—such as whitepapers, blog posts, and presentations—be placed around the video to guide the audience further along the content journey?

These ideas can lead to more powerful calls-to-action in your videos, too.

Remember to check the analytics on each video. Almost all platforms provide marketers with some level of metrics. For this topic, demographic and geographic locations are key in determining if the niche video is reaching the targeted audience. You can also take a look at these analytics ahead of time to determine whether or not the platform is the right one for your campaign.

Keep in mind that view count is not that important when you're targeting a small or niche audience. What is important is reaching an audience that is dedicated and may actually turn into something besides a view.

Instead, evaluate factors like duration of the niche videos you're producing. Look at engagement rates with that audience and see how long-form or short-form content is performing. Is your audience watching your content to completion? Are viewers sharing your content? Commenting? Evaluating all of these metrics can help you refine your strategy with future online video campaigns.

Think About and Use SEO

One of the most powerful ways to grab a niche audience is by considering search engine optimization (SEO) early on in your creation process.

Get together with your SEO experts internally or externally and look at the questions and words this audience is searching for. Using the search terms from your primary audience can help fuel not only your content creation but also the likelihood that your niche video will get discovered.

Marketers can craft the content in videos to target a specific user or customer. This video from Microchip is a great example.

https://youtu.be/j4rzyq9SMHA)

Not only did it create a specific topic for its target viewer, but it also used those search terms in the title of its video. This made the video easily discoverable by a niche audience.

For more advanced online video platforms, use its built-in tools or create video site maps that include metadata such keywords in and around your video players. Take the extra time to populate those tags and fields. These things matter and do make a difference on platforms such as YouTube, Instagram and many more.

Take these tips and apply them to your own video strategy. This niche video approach will lead to more qualified viewers that can contribute to the goals of your overall marketing efforts.

Stjepan Alaupovic's article first appeared on OnlineVideo.net