Module 3 - Audience Profiling

Why bother building a detailed customer profile before running campaigns?

Because understanding a client's business, or your own, starts with genuinely understanding the customer, and that's what allows a video campaign to be built with real empathy and engagement rather than guesswork. I'm going to share the way we try to understand our clients' customers so we can build and target video campaigns properly. This isn't the only method out there, it's simply the one we use, and the document behind it is available as a download, so feel free to add your own questions to it.

A profile like this covers the obvious things: name, where they live, family and relationship status, whether they have children, gender, age, the kind of job they do, their education and their income. None of that is exhaustive on its own, but once you build several of these profiles for a business you start to see threads of commonality, or you might realise there are actually several distinct types of potential customer. That matters a lot for YouTube specifically, because the targeting and audience-building available on the platform is so strong that having genuinely different personas, avatars, or whatever you want to call them, is more useful here than on many other channels.

What else should a profile capture beyond the basic facts?

The environment someone lives their life in: what they follow on social media, if anything, what channels they watch, whether that's YouTube, Netflix, HBO, the BBC or ITV, what books or podcasts they consume, and what they do on their weekends. A lot of this shapes the tone and humour that goes into the creative, because you're trying to find things that will genuinely resonate rather than guessing. It might not feel like it matters at first, but the more we understand about our customers and the more we can put ourselves in their shoes, the better placed we are to develop campaigns, ideas and audiences that actually engage them, not just on YouTube but across marketing generally.

What are the "driving forces" and why do they matter so much?

This section covers a customer's aspirations, desires, fears and frustrations, and it's genuinely one of the most important parts of the whole exercise, because trying to put yourself in someone's shoes this way often reveals the real pain points and problems in their lives, the ones your product or service can actually help with. This matters especially on YouTube, where creating hooks that grab attention straight away depends on tapping into something real. As an example, if you're selling something related to savings for elderly people, one likely fear is running out of money as a pensioner, so a hook that speaks directly to that fear, before offering a solution, is far more effective than a generic pitch.

There are other questions in the full document that are more relevant to specific situations, some suited to business coaches, some more B2B, some more B2C, and I won't go through all of them here, but the point of every one is the same: to paint as full a picture as possible of your customers, your competitors and your business, so you can build genuinely relevant audiences on YouTube later.

Why do you also recommend adding pictures to a profile?

Because I'm a visual person, and pictures start to paint a fuller picture of what someone is actually like: what their house looks like, what car they drive, the products they buy, the food and holidays they enjoy. Words are useful, but pulling in a few screen grabs from Google of the kind of things these people might like adds something words alone can't. That's also genuinely useful later when it comes to casting people to appear in a video shoot, because if you understand the customer's fears, roughly what age they are, where they live and what their home looks like, you go into casting with a much clearer visual idea of who you want and how you want them to come across, since that person is ultimately a reflection of the customer.

None of this work is ever wasted. It builds into a bank of understanding that helps all the way along the process, so it's worth downloading the document, having a go, and getting a bit better at it each time.