In our VidOps series, we’ve been covering the core tenets for VidOps success.
Why you need a VidOps manager
Assessing your video delivery teams, processes, tools and infrastructure
Creating a unified and measurable matrix of requests
If you’re new to VidOps, it’s the industry approach that promotes collaboration, visibility, and shared goals to drive the expansion of owner-controlled video content and the value it delivers. Our customers and Zypester experience have taught us that video product owners that adopt this methodology have a better shot at successful video product delivery — reducing complexity, driving engagement and ROI with speed and quality for your organization.
In this post, we are reviewing the fourth VidOps tenet:
Collaboratively Build Target Audience Personas
The idea of the “ Persona ” is an important part of strategic sales, marketing, and product development best practices today.
Personas are also critically important to building video products and services. By creating clear audience personas, you can better understand your customer, test and continually improve your product, and ensure you are prioritizing the right distribution channels and partners. While it is very important to understand who your audience is, it is equally important to understand where they live. For example, outside of the US, many consumers are not apt to pay $8.99/mo or more for a streaming video service. Companies like iFlix have turned this into an advantage. With so many choices out there for consumer attention, it is vital you get to know your audience. If you want to activate your customers and get them engaged with your video product, you’ll want to build a core set of targeted audience personas to help guide your content, promotion, and development strategy. You can start simple, but aim to refine these personas over time through direct communication and feedback, with a goal of driving ongoing improvements in user experience and growth.
Make sure you leverage your data and collaborate closely with your team members that are most familiar with the audience. Get out there and talk to people, ask questions, be curious. This helps to ensure you’ve captured the most important attributes of your audience personas. Remember, with advances in search and social media advertising, you will have the ability to tightly target your specific audience personas and help validate hypotheses you build around their viewing behaviors. Your online video distribution and monetization platform should have the ability to track these metrics, thus making them actionable.
You can start building your audience personas by gathering collaborators across your VidOps team and asking a few questions:
Understand your goals and how they map to their personal goals and motivations. Are you trying to sell them video or sell ads based on their engagement, or drive engagement for other purposes (like adding value to a subscription product or services like a retail product, subscription box, or fitness membership)? Are you trying to train them? Educate them? Communicate to them for a regulatory or public interest purpose? Your video strategy will change based on these answers.
When are they likely to engage with your product? When will they watch video? How long will they watch for?
What devices are they likely to use to engage with your service? What other video services do they use?
Are they located in the US? If not, think about the local culture of app and video consumption. What is their budget? Are they more likely to subscribe or pay-per-view, or watch for free?
Capturing this information and building persona documents is a great way to get your entire VidOps team engaged in this process, as well as making sure future team members, partners, and vendors understand who your audience is. To this end, we’ve created this free and simple template you can use.
Free Audience Persona Template for Video
This should help you started with a baseline set of audience personas, but don’t forget to continually monitor and update your personas until you have a really good understanding of who your audience is and their behaviors — then meet them where they are to delight them with your awesome products and services!
Learn more about VidOps here.
