Finding a niche audience
Hear from Justine Jordan, CMO at Help Scout, about why company values matter when creating a video series.
What does your brand stand for beyond your products and services? What values do you care about promoting to the world? When it comes to practicing a successful Brand Affinity Marketing strategy, identifying and understanding your business’s values on a core level is key to determining which audience is best for your binge-worthy content.
When executed well, this type of content speaks to people on a personal level and resonates with those values. To engage an audience you first have to understand what makes them tick. When it comes to determining the right niche audiences for your video series, you need to define who you're speaking to, what you're saying, and why they should care. The goal is to create a show positioning statement by identifying three key elements: Audience, Insight, and Theme.
Show Positioning Statement
Your show positioning statement can be framed as, “We connect with people who [Audience], but [Insight], by [Theme].” This statement will serve as the backbone for your video series—when in doubt, refer back to this statement to make sure any creative decisions you make are aligned with your overall positioning.
Audience
A group of people who identify as part of a subculture or niche
In order to craft your show positioning statement, you first need to determine your audience. The audience you choose for your binge-worthy show should extend beyond those who are in your potential customer base. In order to create buzz amongst a niche group of people that care about more than your products or services, you need to find topics they are passionate about and then create content that addresses those topics. This is where identifying a subculture comes into play.
Glossary
- What is a "subculture”?
- In the context of Brand Affinity Marketing, a subculture is a group of people that exist outside of your current audience that often have beliefs or interests at variance with those of the larger culture.
By narrowing in on a specific facet of their personality and their interests, you’re able to more easily uncover their motivations, their broader professional interests, or even a unifying interest shared by the group. Conduct interviews or share a survey with your best customers and find out what makes them tick. Meanwhile, look for trending topics and conversations happening on sites like Reddit and Twitter to get at the heart of what people are talking about. Once you’ve identified your target subculture, frame the group within the context of the broader positioning for your video series by using the “People Who” statement paired with your Insight and Theme.
- One, Ten, One Hundred
- People who wish they could do big creative marketing.
- Anderton's
- People who aspire to be professional musicians.
- Whiteboard Friday
- People who are new to the world of search engine optimization.
- Design Disruptors
- People who aspire to be on the cutting edge of design in the business world.
Insight
A tension between desire and outcome for your target audience
Next, you need to identify an insight about the target audience or subculture you just defined that speaks to an emotional tension or conflict that exists within their lives today. Good insights are usually revealed by landing on an aspiration that the audience for your video series is currently struggling to meet. If you’re stuck between a few concepts, don’t sweat it. As you create more shows for your businesses, you’ll have new opportunities to create shows around positioning statements that speak to different niche audiences as well.
Remember that “People Who” statement we just talked about? Well, the “Insight” component is simply added to the end of a “People Who” statement with a “But” to indicate the conflict.
- One, Ten, One Hundred
- People who wish they could do big creative marketing, but don't have the budget or opportunity to do so
- Anderton's
- People who aspire to be professional musicians, but don't have the money for professional gear.
- Whiteboard Friday
- People who are new to the world of search engine optimization, but need to know how it works to be successful in their job.
- Design Disruptors
- People who aspire to be on the cutting edge of design in the business world, but don’t have access to thought-leaders and trendsetters.
Theme
A proposition which proposes a resolution to the insight
The final component of your show positioning statement is the theme. The theme is the essential message that drives the content of your video series—an answer to the challenges faced by your audience. This usually starts with a verb in the present participle, i.e. an “-ing” word. If you've done the hard work of defining a show audience and insight correctly, thematic options typically reveal themselves, which gives you a series of possible creative executions to choose from (go on, wipe that sweat off your forehead). Remember, though, Brand Affinity Marketing is all about aligning with your brand values, so don't choose a theme that would create confusion amongst members of your current or potential audience.
Here’s an example of how we decided on the theme for our first video series, One, Ten, One Hundred.
- One, Ten, One Hundred
- We connect with people who wish they could do big creative marketing, but don't have the budget or opportunity to do so, by exploring the differences that money makes in the creative process.
- Anderton's
- We connect with people who aspire to be professional musicians, but don't have the money for professional gear, by demonstrating the impact of gear on sound quality.
- Whiteboard Friday
- We connect with people who are new to the world of search engine optimization, but need to know how it works to be successful in their job, by explaining complicated technical ideas simply.
- Design Disruptors
- We connect with people who aspire to be on the cutting edge of design in the business world, but don’t have access to thought-leaders and trendsetters, by showcasing the innovation that’s taking place today.
Video Clip
Watch the One, Ten, One Hundred trailer
- Audience:
- People who wish they could do big creative marketing
- Insight:
- But don't have the budget or opportunity to do so.
- Options for the overall theme of the show:
- Demonstrating how to bootstrap high-end video production
- Exploring how constraints impact the overall creative process
- Breaking down the production budgets of famous creative campaigns
- Remaking famous creative campaigns with much smaller budgets
If you ended up watching One, Ten, One Hundred, then you may know that we went with the second option there and explored how creativity can be born out of constraints. With all of these elements tied together, we ended up with our final show positioning statement: “We connect with people who wish they could do big creative marketing, but don't have the budget or opportunity to do so, by exploring the differences that money makes in the creative process.”
Pro-tip
- Coming up with a great show idea is often half the battle.
- The success or failure of your show will often hinge on the work done in the pre-production and strategy phases, rather than what happens on camera. A good idea executed poorly will almost always out-perform a bad idea executed well, so spend a disproportionate amount of your time on research, ideation, and creative development.