Start With Your Audience Before You Start Your Video

One of the biggest things I encourage people to do when they’re thinking about producing a video, whether it’s for an event, a small business or a branding shoot, is to really stop and consider who your audience is.

It sounds simple, but honestly, it’s a step so many people skip. And when you skip it, everything else gets a lot harder.

When you move into the production phase, you want to already have a crystal-clear idea of who you’re trying to reach. It’s so easy to get carried away with concepts and storylines and visual ideas, but all of that should be reverse engineered from your audience.

When you know who your audience is, you suddenly know where they’re hanging out. Are they seeing your content on a billboard in a public space, or are they scrolling TikTok or Instagram? Maybe they’re on LinkedIn, checking in between meetings. Each platform is a different world, and it makes a huge difference.

This is why I always say, sit down and think about who your audience is, where they spend their time, what they’re looking for, and what kind of content they actually respond to. Once you’ve done that, you can start to reverse engineer the production process around them.

And here’s the thing. If you’re creating content for LinkedIn, your video is going to look very different to something you’d make for TikTok or Instagram. That doesn’t mean you can’t shoot for both in one go... you can. You can create content and edit it into different formats, so you’ve got your landscape version for LinkedIn and your vertical one for TikTok.

But here’s the catch. Just changing the format isn’t always enough. If the story doesn’t fit the platform, it’s going to fall flat. That’s why you see some videos do brilliantly in one place but completely flop somewhere else. It’s not that the video is bad, it’s just not designed for that platform.

So here’s the big takeaway. Know your target audience. Know where they spend their time. Then create content that speaks directly to them in the style and tone that works for that platform.

Whether it’s serious, value-driven content, something humour-based, or jumping on a trend, have that conversation with yourself or your team before you even touch the storyline. Reverse engineer your story from your audience, not the other way around.