Whenever I try to convince someone to do something, I show them how it will benefit them. I address fears or pain points, anticipate objections, and ensure they have all the information needed to make a decision. 

All of which require me to know and understand that person very well.

The same is true for high-quality digital marketing content. The better you know your audience, the more effective your posts and videos will be at converting leads — making audience research crucial to achieving your marketing goals.

Whether we’re talking about a person or a company, there are multiple aspects you’ll want to uncover: your clients’ demographics, behaviors, motivations, frustrations, life goals, needs and wants.

To start, let’s explore four excellent audience research channels you can use to build more accurate client profiles. These profiles will ultimately help you create outstanding video content that contributes to your marketing strategy.

1. Client Comments and Testimonials

One of the best ways to find accurate information about your audience is to examine your current client data to build an “ideal client profile”. Here’s how:

• Use your current client database. Start by identifying your best customers. Ask: Who’s your oldest client to date? Who buys the most from you? Which client generates the most referrals? Then, find common characteristics shared by those loyal clients and group them. What is their age range? Their professions? Where do they live? How’s their buyer journey? Use these commonalities to start outlining what your ideal customer looks like.

• Use your clients’ communication history and feedback. For a more fleshed-out profile, review your clients’ emails and past communications. Pay attention when they express suggestions, complaints, questions or problems about your products or services. Outline these elements to learn about FAQs, side benefits you hadn’t thought of, and common hurdles they face.

• Survey your clients. Don’t settle for archival data! Reach out and ask clients to rate their experience. Send them personalized questions and include a reviews feature in your online store. Create a profile representing the characteristics, wants, and needs of the type of person you love doing business with. Then, use it as a baseline reference whenever you make content choices on things like FAQs, targeted ads, and explainer videos geared toward conversions. Check out these 14 explainer video styles to determine which might be best for your company.

2. Leverage Metrics and Analytics to Expand Your Profile

Metrics are your best friend when trying to understand potential clients’ characteristics.

Platforms such as Google Analytics and social media management tools like Hootsuite and Sprout Social can help you gather data about your clients in bulk and expand your profile to represent a broader segment of your audience.

For social media:

• Engagement rates: What kind of posts get the most engagement from your audience? Find aspects shared by those posts and build content around them.
• Comments: Always review the comments on your posts, which often contain questions and feedback. Sometimes you’ll find unkind words. Those can also be valuable in pointing to areas where you can improve.
• Click-through rate: This is the number of clicks your posts get, indicating which calls-to-action drive the most engagement from your type of audience.

For your website:

• Average visit duration: The average time users spend on your website. It shows whether or not people find your site interesting or engaging.
• Average time on page: Similar to visit duration, this is the average time people spend on one specific page or post.
• Bounce rate: This indicator reveals whether people stay on your site or leave right after landing on it.
• Conversion rate: This metric shows what percentage of people take a specific action on your website (such as clicking on a particular button, subscribing, or buying).

Analyze these metrics and consider A/B tests with your site to better understand the elements that resonate with people and apply those same principles when working on your videos.

3. Keyword and Topic Research Tools

Finding trends in your niche is another great way to determine what your audience engages with the most. And there are plenty of popular digital marketing tools you can use to find and analyze these trends:

• Google Trends: This tool analyzes what people talk about in niches and regions relative to specific topics. You can even set up notifications to inform when the search for a particular keyword or topic arises to coordinate content releases around that surge.
• Answer the Public: Insert two or more words into this savvy tool, and it reveals the questions people are searching for that are related to them.
• Quora: A place to share knowledge. It’s similar to a forum but focused exclusively on asking and answering questions, which can provide a wealth of insights surrounding what potential clients are curious about.

Use the data you collect to inform your content marketing strategy, creating short videos around news or trending topics in your niche and sharing answers and insights your core audience would be interested in.

4. Your competition

Knowing your competition can be a great source of complementary information for your audience research. By definition, their audience is similar to yours, and they may have tried different content ideas — which can save you time and resources by learning from their results. 

Browse your competitors’ social media, blog, and YouTube channel profiles to find posts about similar products or services. Read comments from their audience, and note what resonates the most with them. Then, use that information to deepen your understanding of your audience’s fears, pain points, problems and questions.

Time To Take Action

Conducting effective audience research is a crucial step in your content marketing strategy if you want to set your videos apart from the crowd.

Use the data you gain from audience research to guide your video production decision-making, and you won’t be disappointed with the results!

Contributed to EO by Victor Blasco, an audiovisual designer, video marketing expert, and founder/CEO of the explainer video production company Yum Yum Videos. Besides running the business, he’s a lifelong student of Chinese philosophy and a passionate geek for all things sci-fi. He has also shared his expertise with EO on How To Leverage Video Content To Enhance Internal Communications and 5 key elements of effective whiteboard videos and How to use creative videos to transform email marketing from basic to bustling.

For more insights and inspiration from today’s leading entrepreneurs, check out EO on Inc. and more articles from the EO blog.