How do you match your content to audience and value proposition? Or how can you work with YouTube influencers to promote your brand? Also how can popular YouTubers make their channels more attractive to brand deals? You know video that fails is an expensive mistake. Therefore, it is wise to spend time to define, understand, and find your YouTube target audience before you jump into video production. Join our new article to learn more.
Defining Your YouTube Target Audience
Before starting to work on your next YouTube video, you should think about who your target audience would be.
For example, you want to start a YouTube channel for people who want to lose weight. But this is going to be way too broad an audience for your video to be called a “targeted audience”.
So you need to narrow down your audience depending on their gender, age, occupation, condition, knowledge level or location.
YouTube removed its keyword tool a while back so you can use Adwords Keyword Planner to get a sense of the monthly search volume of different keywords, but this isn’t accurate as it shows the number of searches on Google search, and not YouTube search.
A far better alternative to this is Vidooly’s YouTube Keyword Analysis Tool. It also gives a clear idea on the competition for the keyword.
The more specific you get, the more “targeted” content you can create. Lesser competition. More YouTube engagement. More conversions rates.
Now, “weight loss” is something too general. It has about 5,640,000 results in YouTube. So you have to compete with about 5.6 million results to be one of the top videos on YouTube for this keyword. You won’t be able to rank for this without a massive marketing strategy.
However, by simply looking at YouTube keyword suggestions and brainstorming with ideas of your own, you can easily find and define a target audience for your next video.
So you can define your YouTube target audience as:
- Women over 40 looking to lose weight,
- Teenage girls looking to lose weight, or
- Women suffering from thyroid looking to lose weight
This is what you can refer to as “targeted audience” groups!
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1. Optimize For Your YouTube Target Audience, Not Pageviews
You don’t want to generate traffic, you want to build an audience. While the difference may seem subtle, it actually is the defining factor in this strategy. A lot of people want a “viral video” for their brand, but what happens when your viral video isn’t even hosted on your own channel?
Instead of aiming for a viral video, strive to build your channel consistently. The two can go hand in hand, but the first is just generating one-time pageviews and the second involves actually building an audience.
If you have an audience, you can build a brand relationship with them.
Even if you do try to create a video for the purpose of going viral, it shouldn’t be completely unrelated to your brand. Your content — viral or not — should always connect your brand to your audience.
If you establish an active community, you will get better results on each new video because the audience will be tuning in ready to watch and share your content.
When you’re gauging success early on, any engagement is good engagement. Your likelihood of getting a subscriber on the first video is not high. You just want people to care enough to make some noise.
While pageviews and subscribers measure fundamentally different things, if I had to choose, I would say measuring subscribers is more important. If you’re ten videos in and not getting any additional traffic to your website, you’re not failing.
There’s an inherent value to brand awareness, even if it’s not on your brand property. When it’s time for a viewer to buy something you sell, they won’t have to search through generic product categories. They will be more inclined to search for your specific brand.
2. Work with Creators to Attract More of Your Target
Dane Golden says you might think of this as the “It’s not you, it’s me” plan. For brands on YouTube (or on Facebook video or other social video), what you say about yourself is often not as important as what your fans and the YouTube community at large say about you, and how you engage with video creators.
Many companies are starting to focus on working with creators to drive their brand. The company Sigma Beauty, for example, is building a business around influencers, not its own content.
On their own YouTube channel, they have 64,000 subscribers but strangely only 120,000 views. The reason for this is that they post other channel’s videos to their own channel in the form of playlists. These videos are created by their fans and/or affiliate program members.
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How Big Is Their Affiliate Program On YouTube Target Audience?
Dane looked in the Octoly system to run their YouTube footprint, and found that their affiliate programs videos have 3.5 billion views. Yes that’s billion with a “B.” In February alone, Sigma affiliate videos were viewed 120 million times, and 3,500 new videos were posted that had a Sigma affiliate link in them.
Keep in mind that the videos that included a Sigma link in the description often feature many products. But it adds up. So much so that the company has grown in five years to a company with $25 million in sales last year, mostly through a combination of YouTuber outreach combined with their affiliate program.
Tim Schmoyer says while it’s usually not allowable by YouTube’s terms of service for you to put affiliate links in annotations, it is acceptable to post affiliate links in the description, but you should check in the monetization box for that video that it includes paid product placement. Tim Street says that when you pay people (affiliates) on a CPA (cost per acquisition), and if participants are able to make money this way, it makes it enticing for them to be an affiliate. Lon Seidman on his tech gear channel uses an Amazon affiliate link and makes sure people knows it’s an affiliate link.
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3.YouTube Target Audience: In-Market Audience
An in-market audience is the best choice if your goal is to drive engagements. It is a way to connect with the people who are actively researching your products and services on:
- YouTube,
- Google Display
- or within the Search Network.
Think with Google says, “In-market audiences can drive incremental conversions, helping you to connect with consumers as the last step before they make a purchase decision.”
These can be defined anywhere from apparel and accessories to event tickets or travel; each comes with additional drop downs for more specific targeting.
4. Follow your audience along the consumer journey
Depending on search terms and video content, you can target customers with different types of videos. Is a viewer already comparison-shopping for your service? Your commercial may need to emphasize reasons to choose your business. On the other hand, the same video may not be effective for your established customers.
Customer Match allows you to filter the audience for particular videos using data from AdWords and uploaded email lists. By showing specific videos to your customers and newsletter subscribers, you can reinforce brand loyalty and shape the reputation of your company.
5. Part of a diverse advertising strategy
Facebook is likely to remain the biggest player in social media. But YouTube has a solid footing with vloggers and video content. Rather than advertising exclusively on one website, it’s better to plan an inclusive strategy that includes both social media and paid search advertising on Google.
When users move between search engines and different social media platforms, it’s important to have a clear presence across the different arenas for advertising. The mobile viewers on YouTube spend 40 minutes in an average session. Advertising directly on YouTube allows your business to reach your audience when they aren’t actively on Facebook or interacting with search engines.
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Final Takeaway
One last thing that adds to the stress when identifying a target audience is demographics. Although insights like age, gender and location can be valuable, but they are often shallow in nature and can’t really tell what your audience is struggling with. This is something that you need to guard against.
Focus on What they want to do better, What motivates them and What they need rather than Who they are.
Researching your right audience isn’t about finding stats and numbers, it’s about finding people and what drives them. So define them, understand them and reach them with content that is targeted directly at them.
