Build audience personas for your corporate video production

Customer personas are nothing new to marketing managers, they have been used for years to help inform and design products and marketing materials to engage specific target audiences and segments.

Making a great corporate video production is no different to making a great product and an audience persona is a critical tool that must be placed at heart of every corporate video campaign to help inform the communication of key messages and creative direction that will resonate on an emotional level with your target audience.

It is really important that every corporate video project stakeholder and the video production company are clear on the target audience persona from the beginning of the project as this will be used to inform decision making throughout the video production process.

What is a target audience persona?

An audience persona is quite simply an avatar or an imaginary figure that represents the hopes, ideals, challenges and ambitions of your ideal customer, employee, investor, sponsor etc.

It combines all the human attributes of this individual into a crafted persona with a real name and personality that can be used by the marketing and video production company throughout the video marketing strategy and creative video production process.

What makes a video production persona different to a customer persona?

An audience persona is developed to align with the key objectives of the video marketing strategy or corporate video campaign. It therefore in this instance doesn’t always refer to a customer but can also be an employee, a student, or an investor to name a few. In every case however it must represent the end audience you intend to watch the video and complete a call to action.

For example, if your corporate video content is being made to attract a female engineer then the audience persona should be crafted around a female employee persona with attributes aligned to what demonstrate the type of person that will be successful in this role and ultimately thrive in it and your wider corporate culture.

Alternatively, your corporate video campaign may be seeking to build trust with potential sales prospects and will therefore need to be crafted around a specific customer persona that will reflect and mirror the problems, obstacles, and ambitions that your ideal prospect may be grappling with.

Why do I need to create an audience persona for my corporate video?

Corporate videos work best when they are short, concise, and highly targeted to a specific target audience segment determined during your corporate video marketing strategy sessions.

Once you understand the broader audience demographic the corporate video production needs to target, you can craft an ideal audience persona that will help you humanise your audience segment and create video content that has greater empathy for them.

This avatar will then inform every detail of the corporate video campaign, from the talent you choose, to the language and tone of the video narrative, to the locations and creative direction decisions you make, to where you decide to host your end video on social media.

How to humanise your video production audience persona

An audience persona works best when it is crafted with empathy for the target audience it is seeking to represent. To do this successfully you need to go beyond standard demographics such as gender, age and job and dig deeper into what makes them tick as a human being and then align this to your specific video objectives.

For example if you were making a corporate video to help you hire more apprenticeships your target audience would likely be 16 - 24 school age leavers. To understand and build an audience persona for this demographic you could ask questions such as:

What are they looking for in an apprenticeship? Career development, money, trade, friendship, security.
What are they nervous about? Going into workplace, afraid of being unskilled, 9-5 job.
What might be the obstacles that may put them off signing up to become an apprentice? Paperwork, money, location, management.
What are their career ambitions? Learn on the job, long term career development
What are the benefits to them of an apprenticeship over a university degree? Earning money, lack of debt, faster career development, learning on the job.
What type of qualities or behaviours do they need to be successful in this role? Reliable, eager to learn, humble, consistent.

The answers to these questions will help you make a corporate video that has greater empathy for their needs, motivations and ambitions and enable you to better share how you can support them in this journey.

Who should be involved in creating an audience persona?

Well it depends on who the audience is – if the video content is intended as a sales tool to support lead generation and the end audience is prospective customers then you should really involve your sales and customer service teams in helping you develop your customer persona as they are on the front line day in day out communicating with existing and prospective clients so they will have a good understanding of what makes them tick and what their most common objections are.

If you are aiming to attract new talent into your business, then it would be important to get your recruitment team and the department lead you are recruiting for involved in the development of the employee audience persona.

If you are seeking to engage new investors for your start up company then the founders and senior team need to be involved in crafting the type of investor you are seeking to attract and engage.

Conclusion

Ultimately its always important to remember that corporate video content is not a vehicle to bang on about how great you are but rather it’s a way to empathise with your audience and show you understand them by speaking directly to their hidden motivations and challenges and share how your business can help resolve these for them.

Its not about you – its about your audience so crafting detailed audience personas will help keep your corporate video project on track and ensure nothing gets lost in translation.

MHF video production company

Our full service video production company ethos is to make corporate video more human.

We are here to support you through the entire video production process which can include developing audience personas for your corporate video content and video marketing strategy.

We can project lead your video campaign from concept through to completion delivering you a corporate video that speaks to the people you wish to engage.

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Video production crew setting up for interview

Importance of audience personas in corporate video production

20th April 2022