How to Define Your Target Audience
Reaching new audiences is easy with YouTube ads, but it all starts
by defining your target audience.
You’ll need to brainstorm and figure out which types of people
would be interested in your product or service. That will be based
on things like age, location, socio-economic status, educational
level, interests, etc.
Don’t be vague, either. “Men” or “Women” just won’t work. Think
more along the lines of “30-something career women with 2
children who are interested in starting a home-based business.”
The key is to narrow down your search as far as possible.
Market research, and being able to define your target audience in
a nutshell is important in understanding the customer and how
they are going to make purchase decisions.
reach the right people—those who will relate to your company’s
message and will be interested in your products or services.
Let’s say your company is marketing a new educational toy. Your
target audiences might be children who are X-years old, parents,
grandparents, teachers, and maybe educational specialists.
Now you only need to target those people with your ads to find
some potential clients! You can insert your ad into anything from
a children’s video to an educational show for parents—whatever
you believe is not only relevant, but likely to trigger a positive
response.
That way, you’d get the exposure to different audiences for the
same basic ad. Of course, you’d want to tweak the ad to appeal to
different ages and demographics.
Remember that your target audience isn’t the same as your target
market.
Both are centered around dividing customers into different
groups to help you make informed business decisions.
A target market, however, is a specific group of consumers at
whom your company’s products and services are aimed.
A target audience defines that that group using demographics,
interests, and buying history.
To put it another way, you can define your target market by
finding your target audience.
For example, if your target market is “young men aged 20-35,”
your target audience might be “young men aged 20-35 living in
New York City.”
You can then divide your audience into groups or further define
them using categories like the following:
Purchase Intention: a group of people looking for a specific
product or service who are looking for more information before
they purchase.
Examples would be consumers in the market for a laptop,
automobile, television, or an item of clothing. This sort of
information is important so you can see how to better direct your
messages to your audience.
Interests: a group of people who are interested in the same thing,
like hiking or knitting or basketball. YouTube Advertising: Special Report
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Knowing this information helps you to connect with your
audience in a relatable way and figure out buyer behaviors and
motivation.
For example, customers interested in baseball memorabilia would
most likely be interested during baseball season, when they can
show off their purchases during the games.
Another example: if you discover that a large group of your
audience is interested in eating out, you could figure out a way to
work that into your ads and attract even more attention.
Subcultures: groups of people who identify with a shared
experience, like a certain music scene or entertainment genre.
People define themselves by these subcultures and you can use
those to better understand who you’re reaching out to.
For example, if you think of how a certain subculture relates to
your business—especially if you have a large potential audience—
then you’re reaching your subculture.
Think of how Netflix markets to its different subcultures (people
who like comedy, science-fiction, horror, and anime) using social
media accounts directed at those groups.
Adjust Your Targeting
Defining your target audience involves a good bit of research.
That goes into figuring out exactly who you want to reach and
how you can reach them in a way that stands out from your
competitors.
Here’s how to find your audience so you can adjust your targeting
to reach those people:
1: Use Google Analytics to learn more about your customers.
Google Analytics is great for finding demographic details about
your audience and their interests. This is critical information that
will help you locate a target audience.
With Google Analytics, you can see website insights and how
that’s broken into different sections, like age, gender, and
location.
These sections are clearly labeled on your dashboard and shown
in colorful graphs that are easy to interpret. This tool can be a
fantastic asset that will give you great insight into who’s visiting
your website and how your product or services fit into their lives.
2: Create a reader persona to target your blog content.
The good thing about a reader persona is that it should be nearly
identical to your buyer persona.
You need to remember who you’re writing for and give them
useful content to read. This will build your reputation among your
consumers and make them trust you to recommend products and
services for them.
The main difference between a reader persona and a buyer
persona is that the reader persona usually focuses on whatever
problems that reader might have in their life. Figure out how to
write content that solves their problems with one or more blog
posts.
3: Check out social media analytics.
You need to figure out when your audience is most engaged with
your social media channels.
Is it when you post funny photos or memes, or when you post a
poll?
The answers to your questions can give you clues into the content
your audience is interested in.
Every social media platform is different, with a different audience.
So looking at the analytics across all your platforms is very
important.
For example, Facebook tends to attract an older audience than
Twitter does, but Twitter uses short posts while Facebook allows
longer posts and even videos. Instagram is visually based, so
graphically interesting content would be great for that platform.
If you keep those things in mind, you can plan your strategy
better.
Analytics can tell you who’s looking at your profile, what’s
working, and what’s not working about your content. In order to
gain followers from your target market, you must post content
your audience is interested in.
4: Use Facebook insights.
This is a great tool if you have a Facebook account. Facebook gives
every one of your Pages free insights like who your followers are
and where they’re from.
These insights work very similarly to Google Analytics, giving you
crucial information you’ll need to determine your target audience.
On your insights dashboard, access the People tab to see location
demographics like which city your followers live in. That can give
you some interests that might attract your followers.
Launching your First Campaign
You’ve put in the hours, done your homework, and planned
everything out perfectly. You’ve perfected your script,
storyboarded your ad, found the right talent, shot the ad and
edited it.
The result can be a blockbuster video ad!
But with all that time and effort invested, you can’t just embed
your ad in a random video and hope it reaches the right audience.
Great content is almost certain to become sticky sooner or later,
but it’s important for you to be proactive about getting the
attention of prospective clients and educating those unfamiliar
with your brand.
Running a series of YouTube ads is one way to make sure more of
your target audience is going to find that video you’ve worked so
hard to produce.
Advertising on YouTube is different from running a pay-per-click
ad or a paid social campaign. YouTube has certain specific
constraints, but it also has lots of options. You need some basic
knowledge before you start your next video project so you can
make the most of your ad possibilities.
A TrueView ad can include people, dialogue, and music that’s
been retrieved with permission (or is considered royalty-free).
You don’t want to run a standard promotional commercial
though. Since your ads can be skipped, you’ll want to give your
audience a real reason to keep watching. “Product plugs”
generally don’t grab the views that you’ll want.
Instead, tell some sort of story with your video ad. People love
seeing case studies of others who’ve faced a struggle that they
can empathize with. This sort of ad is harder to skip and it will
make your brand more memorable.
The TrueView ads also provide you with lots of information you
can use to determine how they’re performing.
You can see data on completed views, partial views, click-through
rates on your calls-to-action, whether your video drives channel
subscriptions, any views sourced from a user sharing your
content, and views on the brand’s other content that can be
connected to a user who’s viewed your ad.
These actions can help you understand the value of your video ad
dollars—and where to focus your budget to increase your results.
Non-skippable pre-roll ads can give you some of the same
features as TrueView ads do. You can include people, dialogue,
audio, and other elements that represent your brand—providing
you can do it in 15 to 20 seconds.
Because these ads are non-skippable, your best option is to
include a call-to-action so you can optimize the viewer’s attention.
In other words, encourage your viewers to click on your ad and
receive something useful in return.
To set up your campaign, first go to your Google AdWords
dashboard.
The red “+ Campaign” button on the left-hand tab has a drop
down menu where you should choose “Video.”
Enter a name for your campaign. Make sure you have also
checked the “Video” type from that drop-down menu as well.
Then select “In-Stream or video discovery ads” to make sure your
videos will be in TrueView format.
Set your budget per day and your delivery style. The latter will be
either standard, where your ads will show evenly over a period of
time, or accelerated, which shows the ads as quickly as possible.
Now, decide where you want your ads to appear. With “YouTube
Search,” your ads will appear in search results and on the
YouTube home page, channel pages, and video pages.
With “YouTube Videos,” your ads will appear as in-display or in
stream videos.
With this option, you can also choose to show your ads on Google
partner sites, apps, and the Display Network.
You should try some ads in both YouTube Search and YouTube
Videos so you can see the difference each ad makes.
Define the location where you want the ads shown. You can also
exclude certain locations if you want.
Your YouTube ad is now ready for publication—and ready to net
you some potential clients!
And finally, don’t be afraid to experiment with different ads to see
what your particular audiences enjoy more, and remember to
track your results whenever you test a new ad.
To your success!