Winning video project with Target Audience Persona

What is Target Audience Persona?

In general, persona is the description of a person who represents an ideal customer group or ideal user. This person is usually semi-fictional, a person who is created base on real data about many people. We combine all of that data into one person, that’s why we call this is ideal person. Persona typically contains the following information:

• Demographic information: name, age, gender, place of residence, job, income, marital status, etc.
• Hobbies: transportation, shopping places, activities, entertainment genres, idols, etc.
• Habits: schedule of days, talking style, etc.
• Thoughts: dreams, hopes, fears, ambitions, etc.

Why video projects need Target Audience Persona?

Persona plays an extremely important role in creative projects, it answers the question: “Who are we making this for?” This is the most crucial question, because the audience is the one who decides the success or failure of our work.

You may disagree when brands will be our client, they are the one who decide the project. Here the fact, audiences are clients of our clients, no audiences means no reason for clients to fund money for our project.

When you build an accurate and detailed target audience persona, it gives your team a clear understanding of what the audience expects, fears, or cares about. Once you know what they need, you can create content, visuals, and sounds that truly connect with them. This not only keeps them engaged but also leads your project to success.

Here are the key benefits that Target Audience Persona made on video projects:

Create empathy with audiences

Information from Target Audience Persona helps the creative team gain insight about the target audience and empathize with the audience’s desires. The more the team understands the audience, the easier it is for the work you make to win the hearts of the audience. You can see the world in the audience’s eyes.

Building a target audience persona also encourages the script writing team and creative design team to set aside personal biases and egos. Instead of assuming what the audience wants, it shifts the focus to real needs and expectations. This clarity helps the team create the contents and designs that are not only creative but also highly relevant, increasing the likelihood of connecting with the audience and achieving project success.

Foundation for Decision Making

There are hundreds of ideas and design solutions just pop out in creative projects. Picking and testing each idea can be a daunting task if there’s no clear direction. Target Audience Persona helps the team deal with this easily. With a deep understanding of the audience’s behavior, psychology and needs, the team can narrow down to the solutions that are related to the interests of the audience with considered cost and feasibility.

Understanding the audience also helps to avoid making vague, unwarranted decisions. Instead of saying: “The background color of the video is a bit dark”, the motion designer can say: “The target audience is the ones who have to be working outdoors, they may be watching the video under harsh light, we need to use bright colors so that the audience can easily see the video on their phone.”

Aligning communication

Advertising videos often involve collaboration between Creative Agency, Production House and Post-production House. Each party brings unique skills, perspectives, and processes to the table. While this diversity is valuable, it can also lead to disagreements and conflicts when perspectives clash or priorities differ. Without any document for alignment, these conflicts can slow progress, dilute the creative vision, and reduce the campaign’s effectiveness.

A target audience persona acts as a unifying tool by providing clear, intuitive insights about the audience. Instead of relying on subjective opinions or assumptions, all parties can align around a shared understanding of what the audience truly needs and values. By presenting a common perspective, the audience’s point of view, personas help teams brainstorm solutions, make decisions, and stay focused on what matters most: creating content that resonates with the target audience. This unified approach not only minimizes conflicts but also ensures that every element of the campaign is tailored to deliver maximum impact.

Step-by-step guide for making a Target Audience Persona

1. Define the purpose

It’s essential to start with a clear intention for your video project. Understanding the “why” behind your efforts ensures the target audience persona is tailored to meet specific goals, ultimately streamlining the entire process.

Typically, creative marketing projects are designed for purposes like:

• Shifting audience perception: Building brand awareness, promoting products, or fostering emotional connections that make the audience love the brand.
• Supporting sales efforts: Sharing updates about customer support programs or new offerings to encourage action.
• Educating the audience: Delivering knowledge, insights, or value to empower the audience and build trust.
• Boosting sales: Announcing promotions, discounts, or special offers to drive conversions and revenue.

By determining the exact purpose of your target audience persona early on, you’ll save significant time and effort in the next step, gathering accurate and relevant information. This focused approach ensures every aspect of your project aligns with your goals, making it more efficient and impactful.

2. Gathering Data for an accurate Target Audience Persona

To create an effective and accurate target audience persona, it’s crucial to collect as much relevant information about your audience as possible. The more insights you have, the better you can understand their needs, preferences, and behaviors. Here are some proven methods to gather this valuable data:

• Live interviews with the audience: Direct conversations to uncover in-depth insights.
• Internal enterprise surveys: Utilize existing customer data within your organization.
• Online surveys: Reach a larger audience to gather diverse feedback. You can try using Google Forms or SurveyMonkey.
• Market research reports: Leverage industry data for comprehensive audience trends. You can find some basic reports at Statista or IBISWorld, but it’s quite expensive to get full report from these sources.
• Audience data platform: These platform will automatic collect and synthetic the audience data from their data source, and help you create an target audience persona. Some of these platforms are Audiense and People Pattern.

By combining these approaches, you’ll build a rich and detailed target audience persona, enabling your team to connect with the audience on a deeper level and drive successful outcomes.

3. Identify typical models from data

Once you’ve gathered data about your target audience, the next crucial step is analyzing that information to uncover meaningful patterns. This stage transforms raw data into actionable insights, helping you create a persona that accurately represents your audience. Here’s a simple yet effective process to follow:

1. Organize Data into Categories:
   Review the entire dataset and classify the information into key categories such as:

   • Demographics: Age, gender, location, education, income.
   • Psychographics: Values, beliefs, lifestyle, attitudes.
   • Habits: Buying behaviors, media consumption patterns.
   • Interests: Hobbies, favorite activities, preferences.
     For example, if many respondents indicate they enjoy listening to music, “Favorite Music Genre” can become a specific data point under the Interests category.

2. Group and Reorganize Individual Profiles:
   Take the categorized data and reorganize each survey respondent’s information according to the groups. Look for repetitive traits or similarities across individuals.

3. Identify Key Patterns and Traits:
   Focus on the characteristics that appear most frequently across the dataset. These repetitive traits represent the typical preferences or behaviors of your audience. For instance, if the majority of respondents in the “Favorite Music Genre” group prefer Pop music, “Likes Pop Music” becomes a defining characteristic of your target audience persona.

By following this structured process, you can identify the core traits that represent your audience. These insights will guide your creative and marketing strategies, ensuring they resonate with the people you want to reach.

4. Target Audience Persona Layout design

After processing the data, this is the step to shape the look for the Persona. In general, Persona will be a document used by many parties involved in video animation, so it needs to be well-looked to be easy to view and understand. The parts that appear in Persona are groups of information that have been classified in the previous stage.

You can refer to the following design sample.

The above is just a basic Persona design template, Persona is highly customizable based on the intended use. You should design the Persona template to fit your needs, instead of using a pre-designed template with a miss matched purpose.

5. Fill the person’s information

Once the Target Audience Persona has been designed, it’s time to fill in the information to complete the puzzle pieces. The information to fill in the Persona is the data about the model characteristics that we defined in step 3.

Please keep in mind

1. Never skip Persona

It sounds obvious, but in reality, many creative projects are made that skip the Persona. It can save the team some time in the beginning, but the final result is vulnerable because it is not known what the audiences think.

In case the project is too urgent, we can use pre-made persona templates with similar purposes. If no data is available, the team may consider using a simpler design solution to reduce time, and spend more time working on Persona.

2. Always use real data

Persona is a business document, so it needs to reflect the actual situation. Do not guess about the audience when you have only collected data from 1 to 2 people, or only based on personal experience. Maybe these 1-2 people have the needs we expect, but the rest of the audience doesn’t.

Persona is only reliable when it’s backed by data.

3. Saving time with survey tools

In case you need to collect data quickly with low cost, making online survey is a good solution. We can build well-tested questions and ask the audience to answer these questions. Even surveys can be done in bulk with the help of Google Forms and social networks. With skillful questionnaire preparation, we can easily determine the respondent’s personality pattern and their demographic information.

However, if we have time and resources, we should invest in more in-depth research methods: face-to-face interviews, field trips, product trials, etc.

4. Detail personal description

One of the great advantages of Persona is the humanization of data about the audience. This is reflected in the personality of the Persona character, so it takes a lot of work to describe this section in detail. Personality should be written in narrative form, instead of mechanical bullet points. This description will create intimacy and empathy for Persona viewers, your team.

The personal description will appear first in the Persona document, but it will be done last, when we have compiled all the information.

Key Takeaways

Persona is a powerful tool that, if done right, will save tons of time and money on creative projects. Thanks to Persona, we can understand the desires of our audience, to create the works that address those desires. Thus, your works will both attractive the audience and cost less to make.