How do you know that the film you are making will be successful? How do you figure out if your audience will identify and be moved to action after watching it? How can you help a client to reach a specific goal for their video and the response?
”How do you decide what path to take to best reach your target audience?
JOHN-CLAY: It really boils down to who your intended audience is. What do you want people to do? And a lot of this comes from asking the client.
But I’ve had two different projects recently, one that came to me saying, “We want a college promo,” and I said, “Okay, what do you want people to do when they’re done with the video?” Their response was “Sign up to attend the college.”
So then I had to go think through what’s the best way to showcase college so that people will sign up?
We also did a promo for a marriage conference. I was kind of volunteering to do that one and I had an idea of what I wanted to do. I wanted people to sign up for the conference.
With the conference, we decided not to interview the people who run the conference. Instead, we decided to go talk to attendees who had attended and benefitted from the conference, and that’s all you hear in the finished promo. We didn’t even talk to people who started it, who run it, they didn’t really care to be on there anyway.
So there are different approaches. It kind of depends because you have to think through who is going to watch it? When people are watching it – who do you want to respond, and what do you want them to do? Some people are going to say, “Oh, I hated your project.” That can be okay, if they’re not your intended audience. You should listen to them, but that’s not who you were going for anyway.
So, for example, for a promo about an artist, with all the different aspects of art, is your goal is to showcase them in more of like a human interest way, or to showcase their art and that they sell it, and then encourage viewers to visit the website. Depending on which direction, you might spend more time on who they are and why they got started and the reasons behind it. Or if it’s a certain type of art that they want people to buy, focus on that.
You can cover too much and it will feel like no one thing stood out. So decide if the art is what needs to stand out and if the person creating it is just kind of a side story, or if it’s the person who’s creating it, and what they create is the side story and doesn’t matter as much.
The question is “why?” And the answer to that is how you figure out what direction to take. It just depends on who you want to reach and what you want them to do when they’re done.
