Speak Your Audience's Language with Data-Driven Video Content

Speak Your Audience’s Language with Data-Driven Video Content

Marin Daley-Hawkins

March 25, 2019

The industry can easily agree that, when it comes to online content, video is now a vital component. In fact, by 2021, 80% of all web traffic is predicted to be video. However, many marketers still consider simply uploading the most recent TV commercial to YouTube and sharing the link on Twitter an efficient social strategy. To successfully ride on the wave of this growing online content, the time is now for marketers to take a considered approach to video content in order to see results.

So, what do marketers have to do to create valuable content to reach a brand’s target audience? The key to a successful video strategy on social, or any marketing strategy, is to use available insights that will allow brands and businesses to create creative content that is as personalized as possible. These are the three levels of optimizations that must be considered:

The Specific-To-Audience Approach

In order to create content that is tailored to specific audiences, data is the ultimate key. From age to location, interests to affinities — valuable insights into the target audience can make the real difference to social campaigns. And there are many avenues for marketers to explore.

Take the fact that a brand can look at the audience breakdown from a social platform and create content using that data and analysis. For example, a brand may know that the Pinterest target audience of 18 to 24-year-olds trust influencer recommendations. A creative video solution for them could be adapting an influencer-created moving image that fits appropriately within the other content that specific target audience is more likely to consume, without interrupting the Pinterest experience that the audience enjoys.

Looking back at previous campaigns can provide additional vital audience insights. If the results of a brand’s latest Facebook campaign prove that users within the target demographic predominantly consume content on mobile and that they don’t watch more than the first few seconds of content, creating video content that’s over a minute long is simply not necessary or effective. In fact, that specific target audience isn’t likely to consume the video in its entirety, as it would also require more mobile data to load.

If access to deeper levels of insight is possible, marketers should take advantage. An example is our recent campaign for BrightHouse, where DMP insights showed that relationships were particularly important to the brand’s core audience. This led our creative to be centered around best friends, we produced an impactful short-form video, filmed with 13 actors in seven locations and then supported the campaign with paid media activity and further social assets to drive maximum impact. And the result of this insight and aligned creative, led to levels of engagement on social far greater than usually achieved.

Ultimately, a brand can find a data solution in order to deliver tailored video content to their specific audience. It can be from deeper insights to more simple data including platform demographic data and social analytics. Analyzing the information and any data to hand will have a positive impact on the business.

The Specific-to-Platform Approach

To create successful personalized content, brands must take into consideration which platform the video is going to be consumed on. They need to consider everything from whether the creative content needs to be square, vertical or any other dimensions to whether customers will view the content with the sound turned on.

While this might seem like standard practice, video content is still being shoehorned into other formats that it is simply not optimized for. For example, Instagram stories represent some of the least optimized content where brands at best just add text to a square or horizontal video, which fills only 50% of the screen.

In addition, content should be taking advantage of the platform’s features. Drawing attention to a swipe up link, encouraging users to tap to the next part of the story are features that can be added to the video content with a little creativity and at no extra cost. Ultimately, if a platform is worth using, then good content that has the best chance of performing well is worth creating.

The Specific-to-User approach

Additionally, video content can be personalized on specific data to each user including a user’s name or other basic level information or better. Take Nike, who experimented with using data from its fitness app and created personalized content telling the story of users’ years centered on training goals. Or Spotify’s “Your Year on Spotify” campaign, which was also a creative masterpiece as the feature allowed users to see an animation of their top-streamed songs along with other fun facts, all wrapped into a socially-shareable package.

Ultimately, the more a customer is being talked to as an individual and not as one of the mass group, the more likely they’ll engage with content in a meaningful way. Audiences enjoy consuming content that’s personal and subjective, therefore, research and data are the vital starting points for any creative and strategic decision.

Marin Daley-Hawkins

Marin is Social Media Account Director at Greenlight. She started her career in fashion journalism and PR, before moving into content and social, covering events for blogs and traditional media outlets and running buzz-creating campaigns for a variety of brands. Marin joined Greenlight in 2013, and has since helped retail clients define and execute social media strategies which complement both their other digital activity and offline initiatives.