Videos that Make a Difference: The Power of a Strategic Approach
Video is a powerful tool for raising awareness, amplifying your message, engaging supporters and driving social change.
In the vast ocean of online content, however, simply producing good video content and hoping that the right people find it is a recipe for floating aimlessly on that video sea. The key to having real impact lies in being strategic in all aspects of your video production and distribution. If compelling video content is your boat and your sail, effective strategy is your rudder. That’s how you will get to where you want to go. From defining target audiences, to effective storytelling, to measuring (and learning from) video metrics, every aspect of video production can benefit from a strategic approach.
Understanding Your Audience
The foundation of any successful advocacy video is built upon a solid understanding of the audience(s) you are trying to reach. Whether advocating for workplace safety, environmental sustainability or healthcare reform, pinpointing the demographics, interests, and concerns of your target audience is crucial. Are you targeting workers, policymakers, grassroots activists, or the general public? Some combination of these or other audiences? The more specific you can be in defining your target audience, the more effective your video strategy will be.
The more specific you can be in defining your target audience, the more effective your video strategy will be.
Are you looking to reach viewers in a particular age group, geographic area, gender, job category or other demographic? What do you know about how usage of different video-centric platforms varies significantly by age or gender? The Pew Research Center is a great resource for data that breaks down social media usage by age, gender, race/ethnicity, income, education level, political affiliation and more. For example, TikTok and Instagram user bases both skew younger than Facebook. How can such demographic data inform your video targeting, outreach and digital marketing strategy? You may want to vary your strategy slightly by platform, depending on which social media app you may be prioritizing. By tailoring your message to resonate with the specific needs and perspectives of your audience, you can increase video engagement — and translate more of that engagement into online and offlne action that helps you win.
Crafting Authentic & Compelling Video Narratives
At the heart of every effective advocacy video is a narrative that moves viewers in some way. Everyone loves a good story, whether it’s 30 seconds or two hours long. Video storytelling has the power to evoke emotions, spark empathy, and drive action in ways that text, statistics or facts alone cannot. Whether through personal testimonials, creative visual imagery, humor, or tried-and-true documentary storytelling techniques, crafting a narrative that resonates with your target audience is key. People identify and empathize with real people, telling authentic stories. And when viewers identify with the issues and concerns being addressed by people on-screen, they are often more open to the factual or issue-based arguments that are core themes in a video.
How Do We Know if a Video Was Effective?
In the world of advocacy video production, measuring impact goes well beyond views, likes and shares. While quantitative metrics such as these provide valuable insights into reach and engagement — and can help you to course-correct and do more of what is working well — qualitative metrics can offer a deeper understanding of audience sentiment and perception. Analyzing comments, feedback, and social media discussions can help gauge the effectiveness of your videos in driving conversations and influencing opinions (taking haters and trolls with a grain of salt, of course…)
Polling and surveys of target audiences can also be valuable, especially if you have the time and resources to conduct before/after polling and track any movement on what people think about key policy issues, candidates, legislation, etc before and after a communications initiative in which video is a key component. Interviews with members of your target audience can also be very informative, and provide insights into how they found out about it, did they share it, did it lead them to subscribe/donate/sign-up/join, etc. (Some of the latter can also also be gleaned from a combination of video analytics and website stats that help track “conversions.”)
Overall, by combining quantitative analytics with qualitative feedback, you can gain a broader view of the impact of your videos, whether you are reaching your intended audiences, what is working well and what could be improved.
Examples of What Works – Techniques, Case Studies and More
Moving forward, this blog is will focus on exploring what works well in the world of labor, environmental and social justice advocacy video. We are seeking good case studies from organizations and campaigns that have used video to help them win. We will break down what they did, how they did it, why they did it, who they hoped to reach and what impact did the video(s) have.
Know of any specific examples in which video has been a vital cog in communications and organizing organizing efforts, helping move the ball forward in concrete ways? Or maybe even examples where video clearly helped a campaign to win? Let’s us know about it at info@impact-video.com. We’ll dig into it and let you know what we find here.