1.2: Understanding Your Audience

Defining your Target Audience

Your target audience refers to a specific group of consumers most likely to view your content or want your product or service, and that often indicates the group of people who would be most impacted by your ad campaigns. Understanding your target audience may also be useful in determining which online platforms to use to best reach your audience. If you don’t know your target audience, start off by doing some brainstorming and research:

1. Create an ideal customer or viewer profile. Define the people who are most likely to view your content.
2. Conduct market research in the form of surveys or focus groups to gather interest.
3. Research your competition, see what is already being produced in this area.
4. Put out sample work or a teaser and use tools such as Google Analytics to see who is engaging with your content online.

Figure \(\PageIndex{1}\): Over the shoulder view of Man looking for streaming content (Pixaby License; Image by Mohamed_Hassan via Pixabay)

Demographics

Audience demographics are a way of categorizing statistical information about your viewers, such as age, gender, household income, education, location, etc.

Understanding these characteristics of your audience is critical for marketing campaigns. There are companies that specialize in gathering statistical data on audience demographics, such as Nielsen, which measures activity and engagement across a variety of platforms, from TV screens to smartphones. This data is used for determining who is engaging with the content and projecting which type of commercials will likely be most effective for this group of audience members. Social media networks are studied for their demographics to determine how many active monthly users are engaging with the platform and how often each day they are actively using the platforms.

Figure \(\PageIndex{2}\): Man and Woman looking for content on a laptop (Pixaby License; Image by OmarMedinaFilms via Pixabay)

Audience Gratification

After you have determined “who” your audience is, take a moment to think about “why” your audience wants to watch your video. What are they getting out of the experience? Are they being entertained, educated, informed, or escaping from reality? Do they connect with your message, talent, or does it build a sense of community?

According to Denis McQuail’s research on media consumption, the reasons people consume media use can be grouped into five uses, the audience wants to:

1. Be informed or educated
2. Identify with characters of the situation
3. Be entertained
4. Enhance social interaction
5. Escape from the stresses of daily life