Turn Views Into Sales With Video Market Targeting

market targeting

So, you’ve heard about how effective video marketing is and you’ve decided to try it out yourself. You created a video brief, found a production team, defined a video marketing strategy – the whole nine yards. But after a while, you noticed that even though the videos are getting a lot of views and the campaign looks great on paper, you’re not seeing a significant increase in sales. What are you doing wrong? Is your market targeting wrong? Is there a better way to convert those viewers into customers?

Let’s talk about all the things that could have gone wrong with your campaign and see how you can identify them. Once these issues are identified, we’re going to check out some solutions that will help you run video marketing campaigns that are more successful in the future.

3 Signs Your Videos are Targeting the Wrong Audience

One of the most common reasons that campaigns do not perform as they should is because they are targeting the wrong audience. Business 101 teaches us that the better you understand your customers, the more your business will grow. But companies often struggle to properly define their target market – which leads to bad results. Here are 3 situations that indicate you’re serving content to the wrong customers:

Low Visit to Lead Conversion Rates

Videos convert better than any other format out there including text. But this won’t help if you’re using your campaign resources ineffectively. Low visit to lead conversion rates happen when you’re getting a lot of video views but a very small portion of those viewers is interested in buying the product or service. Having 150,000 video views means nothing if only 100 people are interested in your product, and only 10 of those actually buy it.

Successful market targeting ensures that your videos are not targeting customers who are not searching for what you have to offer. This is a very serious issue from a marketing standpoint, and you can address it by closely examining your target market and buyer personas. It is very important that you target relevant audiences with your video marketing campaigns.

Low Engagement on Videos

Another way to find out if you’re targeting the wrong audience is by following viewer engagement on the videos. Usually, videos that generate relevant traffic have lots of likes, up votes, comments, shares, etc. In fact, potential customers will always interact with your content in some way. They may ask you questions, join discussions about the product’s features, provide feedback, etc. This especially applies to social video marketing campaigns.

If there’s not much activity on your videos, you should probably start thinking about finding a more focused group of viewers.

Longer Sale Cycle

Besides wrong market targeting, this situation relates to a bad video content strategy as well. Longer sale cycle means that either the video isn’t performing as it should, or the recipients of the content aren’t consuming it well. Either way, it results in an increased customer acquisition cost (CAC) and less effective sales. Meaning your business is spending too much time to acquire and keep customers. To compensate, sales agents have to dedicate additional time and resources to educate the customers, instead of focusing their efforts on selling the product.

How to Improve Your Market Targeting?

market targeting

Image credit: fogfish (via Flickr)

Now that we know how to identify some of the things that can go wrong with your target audience, let’s have a look at how you can overcome this issue. Here are 5 questions that will help you to determine the best strategy for market targeting:

1-Who will be interested in my product or service?

Try to understand your product or service from a customer’s perspective. What does it do? What type of problem does it solve? How can a buyer benefit from it? Then use that information to identify people who have that problem. They are the customers who are prepared to spend money on what you’re offering.

Once you identify this group, you’ll present your product as a viable solution in an engaging and informative video. You can start this process by using a keyword tool to get insight as to how many people are searching for terms that are related to your product or business idea.

2-Who is already buying from me?

Your existing customers should tell you a lot about how to proceed with your market targeting. Study your audience and learn what they have to say about the product or service. This is a great place to start refining your target groups and video marketing strategy by finding customers with similar opinions and behavior. The more you understand your customers, the faster your customer base and business will grow.

3-How will I find my future customers?

Use techniques like market segmentation, surveys, research and one-on-one interviews to learn about your potential customers. You can even release the product in a test phase, just to see how people react, and who will be interested in buying.

You’ll need to be able to reach out to the target market effectively. Your video marketing strategy will heavily depend on your audience’s geographic and demographic profile, buying patterns, online behavior and location. Conduct market research and discover as many details as you can about your target customers.

Here’s a video that thoroughly explains market segmentation and the process of developing a target market.

4-How will I sell my product or service?

Knowing exactly how you plan to do business will help in defining the proper target market. Will you sell products via a website or a physical location, or maybe both? Will you operate globally or locally? Answering these questions can help narrow the target audience.

5-How are my direct competitors targeting their customers?

Analyzing your competition can give you a pretty good idea about what type of customers you should target. Although it is not a wise move to copy your competitor’s marketing and targeting strategy, it’s always good to gather insights. Afterwards, you can come up with an even better and more successful strategy to target your customers and deliver relevant content.

5 Tips for More Effective Video Market Targeting

Identifying a target market is one of the most important aspects of your video marketing strategy. But there are other things you’ll need to focus on. Let’s find out what else you can do to improve your strategy and run more effective video marketing campaigns.

1-Follow up on Trends and Best Practices

It goes without saying, but you’ll need to keep updated with everything that happens in the world of online video. Otherwise, how would you know which techniques perform well, and which ones you should avoid? Read research about online video and use that knowledge in your own campaigns. You’ll be amazed how fast things can change for the better and how this knowledge can enhance your understanding of market targeting.

Let’s give an example. In 2016, around 50% of video views will be happening on mobile devices. This clearly indicates the massive rise of mobile video, and businesses can make use of it by starting to upload and share native content on mobile video platforms.

2-Work on Video SEO

SEO is the foundation of digital marketing. Without it, you won’t be able to get organic traffic, which can be devastating for the campaign. The better you optimize your videos for the search, the more people will find out about the product or service you’re promoting. YouTube is the best video platform for SEO. Why? Because it is the second largest search engine in the world, and it is owned by Google – which dominates the search.

That being said, publishing videos on YouTube is a must for everyone that plans to maintain their online presence. Good video SEO can help you maintain traffic to your videos.

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Tips for Optimizing Videos

  • Do a keyword research, and find out what people type in the search for finding details about your product, service or business idea.
  • Make sure to include a focus keyword in the video’s title, thumbnail image and description box.
  • Write catchy titles.
  • Always create descriptive thumbnails.
  • Include links to your website, newsletter, blog and every other piece of content that can engage viewers into taking action.
  • Always fill out the proper video category, sub-category and tags.

3-Become a Storyteller

Videos with stories tend to perform better than traditional product videos for a simple reason: they are more fun to watch. Plus, viewers can relate to the story in some way and become inspired to try out your product. If you’re not already creating videos with stories, you should definitely consider giving it a try. Here’s an idea: Introduce a common problem your audience has, build up a story where that problem exists but can be easily solved, and present your product as a solution.

4-Always Leave a Call to Action

When you think about it, every time you sign up for something, fill out a form, or download an app, it is because of an effective call to action. CTA is a very powerful technique that answers the question “what next” when used in videos. It can inspire viewers to take the next step towards becoming your customers and boost the engagement on the video. Whether it is a link to your online store, a signup form for a newsletter, or even a share button, a call to action can help you enrich your videos and boost your conversion rates. Check out these great call to action examples to get a better idea of how to engage your viewers.

5-Don’t Settle for a Single Platform

In times when we have at least a few dozen awesome video platforms, it would be a waste if you focused on a single site. By being active on multiple platforms, your videos will get maximized exposure and outreach. You, on the other hand, will collect insights on viewer behavior, campaign performance, demographics, engagement – all of which can help towards building more focused market targeting.