The importance of insight-led video strategy

To truly know someone, we need to understand the reasons why they think or act in a certain way. That understanding is what we mean by insight. There can not be enough emphasis put on the importance of creating content that is engaging, emotional and relevant. To do this effectively, we use insights by conducting research into your audience’s needs, goals, interests, and preferences.

The knowledge provided by an insight allows us to empathize with an audience. This informed empathy enables us to design campaigns that connect on an emotional level, providing many more benefits beyond minimizing the risk of misjudgement.

It is only through systematic research that assumptions can be replaced by insights. These insights will enable you to reach your target audience at the right time, right place and with the right content. They will help you to address their needs and solve their problems, to engage with them emotionally and speak to them in their own language.

As Lazar Dzamic, creative strategist at Google Zoo EMEA, says: “Having an insight opens door to attention, and if the door opens to their souls and lives, they will give us more of their attention and time. Someone recognizes their mood state they will know it is relevant for them. Immediate emotional resonance with whatever we do means the company reduces guesses.”

Three steps to success

To build an insight-led video strategy it is important to follow these three steps:

Collect research

Ideally, both primary and secondary research into the needs, goals, and preferences of your target audience should be conducted. Primary research gathered directly from your target audience will provide you with first-hand, original data. This could be through interviews, focus groups, questionnaires, observations, and workshops. Secondary research (also known as desk research), allows you to employ findings from existing and published data.

Quantitative and qualitative research can be conducted as part of an insight-led approach, however qualitative research will enable you to gain an in-depth understanding of underlying reasons and motivations for your target audience’s preferences and behaviours. In-depth interviews and focus groups are effective for this.

Discover insights, Develop Ideas

Once you’ve conducted your research, the collected data needs to be analysed. This allows for themes to be identified and insights to be pulled out. From here, you are able to define personas and develop experience or journey maps.

Create, Measure, Refine

Create content to test with a sample of your target audience and refine and revise it based on response received. Once content is distributed, measure and analyse its performance and effectiveness. Insights can be gained from the way your audience reacts to and interacts with your content. This may be used to help you tweak it to improve its effectiveness or to inform the creation of future content.

Using an insight-led video strategy, revelations uncovered by careful research can drastically change how your brand thinks. These types of discoveries can be hugely beneficial, as can be seen in the following case study:

Hub worked on a campaign for Janus Henderson Investors, who wanted to target a potential new audience that had savings between £40,000 - £150,000 but were not keen on investing their money because they thought it was a complicated and risky process. Find out how Hub used insight to create the ‘Steps to Investing’ campaign and how it turned out to be effective.

Sajnee Shah is a marketing executive at Hub TV