The hallmark of content marketing is the idea that deeply understanding your audience gives proper insight into solving their pain points. This is why any good content marketing plan starts with researching a target audience. It is important to produce relevant content that will resonate with your base. Content that continuously misses the mark may leave your audience turning to other influencers.

Video Starts with the Audience

Let’s start with the first step: creating buyer’s personas.

‘Buyers’ are potential customers that are the focus of your product, brand, or even influencer content. This really depends on what you as a company or individual output. If you want to do market research before output (this is ideal!): create persona’s for a segment you’d like to serve. Here are 2 that we use:

The above pieces are still missing some valuable information. If the product/service is going to be limited to a certain geographic location that’s something to include in these personas. Including geographic subsets for profiles lets you switch up advertising strategies to maximize efficiency. Last, but certainly not least, is discerning trends and interests that are associated with these personas. To accomplish this, we are going to have to take a dive (albeit a fairly shallow one) into trends, hashtags, and groups.

Since we can’t reasonably have a list of likely interests from the get-go – we have to use the one the internet provides: trends! From a list of the most popular content, ideas, and events we are going to populate our buyer’s interests. There will be a future guide going into more detail about this process, but for now, just match up those trends and hashtags with the profiles you’ve created. With a complete profile, you should have a much better idea of what type of content to produce and the style of that content.

With audience research in tow – it’s time to move onto:

Using Video as a Promotional Tool for Events

• Attract Attention Before the Event – Don’t just plan the video shooting process around the event itself – prepare to capture and socialize the weeks, days and even moments leading up to the event (think of the hype!). Run paid social promotions on the highest yield networks (this is where your audience research comes in handy). Since you know where your ideal target audience spends most of their time – coupled with their interests – this is a great opportunity to spin pre-event content and hype in light of popular trends. For example – content marketing is a hot topic – if you are able to produce a few blog posts(a video blog is even better!) that expound the topic of the event(and add value to the customer journey), your brand gets an added boost in the authority on the topic. Perceived authority on a topic is a huge factor in whether potential attendees decide to make the trek. Additionally, much closer to the event, capturing video is the way to go. Footage of the venue being set up, attendees arriving, interviews with the event host(s), and even film teasers will ensure that your audience is captivated before the curtain rolls. Uploading this type of content to top social sites (don’t forget Instagram) natively will secure the best reach by maximizing social algorithms.
• Create Highlight Videos – Should the event be a sales conference, hire a professional film crew to capture footage of the presenters and speakers individually. Video viewers love to watch interviews, particularly at trade shows and consumer activation events. Highlighter videos can also be used to show fans engaging with event attendees. An effective way of encouraging event attendees to share the videos they shoot personally on a smartphone or camera is to request them to upload the content using a particular hashtag. Incentives and prizes are some influential tactics as an event promotion tool.
• Feedback and Testimonial Videos Post-Event – A social media plan should be put into place once the event has come to an end. This is the time to really promote your brand and demonstrate just how successful the event was. Short clips tend to capture attention better than longer clips, so try not to upload anything that is longer than a minute. Grasp the viewer’s attention by changing the scenery every so often, such as the setting, the people featured in the video, the theme, what is being spoken about, etc. When you shoot and upload post-event, exhibitor, sponsor, and customer interviews, viewers will understand the relevancy of the event, which will keep people talking.