Who ARE Your Customers? How To Profile Your Video Audience

In today’s video, we’re talking about how to profile your audience. Why would you wanna do that? Well, as we know, profiling your audience and understanding your audience is key to any effective video marketing strategy. You really need to understand the people that you’re talking to and you need to get to know what it is, what are their pain points, and how you as a business can help them. So why on earth should you bother listening to me?

Well, I’m Jeremy and I am a DP, cameraman, and producer with 20 years experience in U.K. broadcast TV, but also I have owned my own business for over 15 years. And the last three years, I’ve been steeped in the world of digital marketing as I’ve been trying to bring my professional heritage and skillset to leverage it to really, really help real people and real businesses.

I’m on a massive mission to help businesses make the most out of videos so that they can grow.

So, why do you need to know your audience? At the end of the day, your audience are your potential customers and they underpin your business. So, it stands to reason you’re going to really want to understand them and how best you can serve them as much as possible. Without an understanding of who your audience are, how can you be sure that you’re selling the right things to the right people? And if you don’t understand what they’re searching for, how they actually get to your business in the first place via Google or, you know, personal recommendation, however it is, how do you know that you’re actually offering them something that they want?

And if you don’t understand what they’re searching for, how they’re finding you and your business, how do you know that you’re offering what they actually need in terms of products or services? Without an understanding of your audience, because I’ll be honest, it is a fairly hefty piece of work to do, but the time investment really, really pays dividends.

It’s one of those things that once you’ve sat down and invested a few hours in going through and profiling your audience, which we’ll talk about in more specific detail in a second, it really does focus your mind and you really start to understand in terms of your messaging, whenever you’re communicating anything, whenever you’re creating videos, or if you’re doing blog posts or whatever, you can really visualize in your head who you’re talking to. And that really sharpens up the focus on your content so that you’re not being too generic.

The danger is, if you’re producing generic communications and obviously in this particular session, we’re talking about videos, if your videos are not that particularly targeted or they’re not speaking about something that resonates with your audience, then simply, the videos aren’t gonna land, and actually your audience will drift off and you have a very, very short space of time to engage with your audience and to almost prove to them that you’re understanding the position that they’re in and also understanding the problems that they are trying to solve which is why they have come across your content or your website in the first place.

And, you know, profiling your audience is all part art of being able to understand that. As I say, your communication won’t resonate with people in the right way, if it is too generic. Also the other danger is if you’re producing stuff which is kind of a very general sort of style of communication and it’s not particularly well targeted, your business can really appear to be quite out of touch or uncaring or maybe a little bit aloof. Or, worst case, it could look like it’s completely kind of misguided when you’re kind of offering the wrong kind of product or service or you’re talking in terms that just really do not resonate or land with the people that you’re trying to attract into your business. And obviously that would be an absolute disaster for you.

Also, the other thing is one that you’ll find if you really don’t understand who you’re speaking to, is that any ad campaigns that you run, so Google Ads or YouTube or Facebook Ads, most likely you’ll end up running campaigns that will cost your business money in the sense that your ROI will be way, way down.

And part of the reason for this could be that if you haven’t spent the time to go and drill down and really understand who your audience are, then actually you could be producing ads and writing copy that simply is so wide of the mark it’s not landing at all well. What we always suggest, and what I always say to people is you need generally to approach everything from your audience’s perspective. The whole point of this exercise that we’re gonna go through and talking about profiling your audience and creating a customer avatar is you’ve got to really put yourself in their shoes. By doing that, you start to really understand what it is that will be attractive in terms of your product or service to your audience and you can start to lead with those sort of things.

So always I say, always concentrate on WIIFM from your audience’s perspective, obviously this is which would stand for what’s in it for me. What’s the point in them, your audience, engaging with your content? You need to be creating content that serves your audience, that gives them value so they’ll come back for more.

It also then starts to establish you as an authority over time. This is obviously not within the first couple of videos, but if you’re producing videos over a long period of time, it starts to establish you and your business as an expert and it also critically starts to build up a sense of trust between you and your audience.

And that is absolutely what you want to aim for. So, as I said, absolutely always, always, always produce content. And this goes for video, or it goes for blog posts, whatever you’re creating, always make sure you’re offering valuable advice, actionable advice, and advice that will really meet the needs of your audience. You know, don’t talk about, in your communications, don’t focus on you to begin with. It’s all about them, it’s all about how you can help your audience achieve or overcome the issues that they’re facing at that point.

And we’ll get to those. You can define the sorts of issues that your audience will be facing by doing a customer avatar exercise which we’ll be leading into in a couple of seconds. As I say, it’s really not about us as business owners, it’s about our audience. It’s about how we can solve their issues or their pain points. At that point, after that, you get into the validation kind of phase, if you like, that’s when you start to talk about how qualified you are as a business or as an expert to help them with the problem.

But before you do that, you’ve really got to start building up that know, like, and trust. So, the kind of validation, the fact that you’ve won loads of awards and all of that stuff, that all happens a lot later on in the process. It’s not something you should really start going into straight away because frankly, if you imagine you’ve come across a business for the first time, you don’t really know who they are and the lead in their conversation is all about how they’re great, how they’ve won loads of awards, it’s not really getting off on the right foot really, is it? It’s it would say to me as a potential client, well, actually you seem to be more obsessed by you and the awards you’ve won rather than helping me. So you’ve got to just bear these things in mind.

And like I say, always produce content that is relevant and that will actually help your clients or your potential clients lives, will better their lives in some way or other. So how do you actually get to understand your audience? And that is where customer avatars or client personas come in. So what is a customer avatar? Well, it’s a detailed representation of a particular kind of set of people that your business serves.

You basically flesh out and create a character. And that acts as a touch point and a sense check for all of your communications or your ads, or anytime where you’re communicating out towards your audience, you need to run those communications through like a little sense check, which is, is it actually going to make sense to the people that I want to be targeting with this particular communication? So the customer avatar, it covers age, it covers gender, but also it’s really designed to get you as a business owner, thinking like your client does to really empathize and understand what the issues are that your potential customers are trying to solve. So it covers age, gender, but also it really helps you kind of get into that headspace of your potential customer, to identify with their mindset, to understand the issues that they’re facing and how your product or service can help them. It really, really focuses what you say, and how you say it.

The other thing to say here is that there may be one or more groups that you serve within your business. Now it’s not about profiling every single person that walks through your door.

It’s being a little more generalist than that, but there will be types of people that you’re serving. So it’s not super macro, but it is clusters of people. For example, it may be that if you’re an accountant, you might deal with one-man bands, that might be one set of your marketing, so people that are one-man band businesses.

But also another set of people that you might deal with as an accountant might be slightly bigger companies, you know, people with payroll and things like that. So that would be another set of people that will have different needs to the one-man band.

Therefore, what you talk to to one set of people will be slightly different to the one-man band. That’s the whole point of profiling your audience in this way. It’s just making sure that your communication is really, really tailored, and targeted.

So the customer avatar questions, these get quite sort of specific and they are, you know, on the face of it, sometimes it might seem like it’s a little bit over the top, but it allows you to really flesh out and give voice ultimately to your customer avatar. So I would really suggest you do go into this level of detail.

So first it’s things like age, gender, marital status, what job they have, the title of the job, and in what sort of company, where they’re based and also their family, have they got kids, that sort of thing. Also, the other thing which is critical to understanding the mindset of your clients, your potential clients, are the education. You know, wherever they come from, what you’re trying to do is you’re trying to build sort of almost a mini backstory to them, where have they come from and how did they get to where they are now?

Because obviously everyone’s career journey influences the decisions and how they interact at the point at which you meet them.

So it’s really good to understand that and give detail, flesh that sort of stuff out. Also, where are their career goals, what are they? And what are their day-to-day goals? So in terms of the career goals what mission in a larger sense are they on as an individual within the company that they’re working in?

And then also day-to-day wise, are they super busy? Is it literally one of those sorts of roles where they sort of feel like they’re firefighting the whole time? Well, if that’s the case, for example, then if you’re talking to someone who’s constantly on the go constantly really, really pressed for time, you definitely do not want to be targeting them with really long videos. You wanna be super snappy and super to the point. It’s all about creating content that fits the person that you’re targeting.

Are they a decision maker? Ultimately, if you’re selling a product or service to these people, are they a gatekeeper? Will they have to ask someone else? And also what are the likely issues they’ll have within their role? As I say, it could be something like time, they might just be frankly really, really busy, or it might be something where they have a million things to do and actually what they want is someone to take ownership of the issue so that they can delegate straight to you so that you’re offering almost a done for them service.

All of these things are really, really critical. Also other questions, which kind of delve a little bit more into the mind space aspect of your potential clients, what are their likely motivations for getting in touch with you? Why do you think they will have either done a Google search or picked up the phone or looked for a recommendation from their friends? You need to understand the motivations because then you can obviously use those motivations and flesh those out so that you can tailor your offering to those things that they’re looking for.

Also, what does success look like to them?

As in, you know, you’ve obviously got a product or service, but for your client, what would a good day look like? Do you see what I mean? What would success looked like to them? Is it that they’ve delegated something to you, you’ve taken it and run with it and actually the project’s gone fantastically well? Or if you’re selling physical products, it’s something that they’ve got a defined sort of issue with?

They can’t do this, you ship them the product you also give them some really useful kind video information in terms of instructional videos, things like that, and therefore they’re able to pick up the widget that you sent them and also with all of your support materials, like the instructional videos, for example, they are able straight away to use that product that you’ve sent them.

And that may be something that your competition don’t do. Do you see what I mean? So it’s really, really vital to hone in on customer success at the end of the day and how you can really, really best help your potential clients in this way. What are their objections likely to be?

I mean, this could be a whole host of things. It could be timing, it could be cost, it could be all sorts.

But you want to understand what you think are the kind of stumbling blocks to them engaging with you and ultimately purchasing your product or service. You need to think about this because these objections, you need to be able to overcome these objections, throughout the sales process, I hope that makes sense. But basically, if people are saying, well, it costs too much, then you need to start to reframe the way they think of the investment they’re going to make in your product or service.

So, you need to be able to overcome these objections within your videos or if you’re doing sort of printed materials, then overcoming those objections is obviously a really critical part of moving them from a browser into a buyer in terms of their customer journey.

So how do you put it all into practice? Well, you need to make sure you’re super, super specific in your communications and I can say, if you’ve gone through the detailed work of fleshing out those customer avatars and those customer personas, you will be then talking to one specific set of people with any particular communication. What you wanna move away from I’d suggest, is the notion that you just produce one kind of communication, which is generic and kind of fires out at everyone. Because that’s not going to resonate particularly well if you imagine you have three different sets of people.

If you’re doing something generic, it speaks a little bit to all three.

It doesn’t really meet the needs specifically of any of those sets of people. So, you need to be thinking about communicating in a much more specific way and addressing specific issues those people have. You need to then tailor the offer that you have. Ultimately it could be the same product or service, but what is important to each of those customer avatars may differ slightly.

You’d alter the way that you approach them, and you’d alter what you lead with in terms of what your product can offer that particular group of people. You can also then overcome the objections in a focused way, rather than in a generic sense. Well, listen, I hope that’s been of value to you. Thanks for listening. You can find more help on this channel.

There are loads and loads of videos ready for you to start to create your own video content.

That’s what this channel is all about, it’s all about empowering businesses to make the most of video. And if you have any suggestions for any topics that you want me to cover, just ping me a message in the comments below I’d love to hear from you.

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