Chapter 3

Targeting Your Audience

IN THIS CHAPTER

Bullet Creating a profile of your audience

Bullet Understanding the power of audience insights

Bullet Identifying unique actionable insights

Bullet Leveraging powerful insight tools

In this chapter, you discover the power of an audience insight to form an actionable base for your ad campaigns and content initiatives on YouTube. You find out how to use powerful research tools to uncover meaningful insights about your audience and ways to use those insights to influence the creative of your ad campaign or content strategy.

Creating a Picture of Your Target Audience

Before you get started, you need to have a deep understanding of who your marketing campaign will speak to. If you know your audience, you’ll be able to make choices that inform both the video creative you make and the media targeting options you select.

You can reach just about anyone on YouTube. Google and YouTube offer lots of tools to help learn about and target your audience, ensuring that you reach only the people you want to talk to. Taking some time to think through who you’d like to target will help make your marketing campaign more manageable and focused. You’ll have lots of options as to how to buy your media to reach them, but start by creating a clear picture in your head of who they are so that you know who you are talking to.

When it comes to defining an audience, marketers often break people into subgroups, which they then use to inform the development of creative, like advertisements and content, ensuring it speaks more directly to that group. For example, if you make a product that is targeted to parents, think about who those people maybe. How old are they? What are their behaviors and lives like? What challenges do they face? What do they like to watch, and where do they like to go?, These initial audience insights will inform your creative choices on how you communicate your product and ultimately how you make your YouTube video ad.

You can build a profile of your target audience by thinking through a few classic marketing dimensions:

  • Demographic: Demographic dimensions are things like the audience’s age, gender, parental status, or even household income. Perhaps you run a luxury stroller company, and you want to target first-time parents with a household income of $75,000 or more. Your video creative may feature parents of a similar age, dressed in a way typical of that age group that would resonate with your desired audience.
  • Geographic: Think through where your customer is located. They could be a local audience, nationwide, or even worldwide. Ask yourself where the people most likely to be interested in hearing from you are living and keep this in mind when developing advertising creative or content that speaks to them. For example, if you run a local bakery, your video ad may feature your store and scenes of the town where it can be found. If you run an online baking supply store, featuring local imagery probably won’t be as important as showcasing your supplies being used in bakeries all over the country.
  • Psychographic: Psychographics deal with mindset. You can think about your audience’s personality traits, including things like their value and belief systems, interests in life, political, social, and cultural attitudes, and more. When you think about your audience through a psychographic lens, you start to build a fuller picture of who they are beyond just demographic and geographic criteria. You may decide to make video creative that overtly speaks to your audience’s opinions on a topic. Perhaps you’re passionate about the environment and have decided to lobby for your township to change its recycling policy. In your video, you can directly appeal to your audience for support by showing a local park becoming a cleaner environment without plastic bags if a policy change was made.
  • Activities, lifestyle, and interests: Diving deeper into building a full and complete profile of your audience members, you can think about the kinds of activities they like to engage in. Perhaps they spend their time engaged in outdoor activities, such as camping and hiking, or perhaps they prefer fine dining and wine tasting holidays. When you’re creating video advertising, you can often find better performance results by including signals that resonate with your audience. For example, a Canadian-based fashion retailer made a series of advertisements promoting its men’s clothing range. The retailer discovered that country music and bluegrass were popular with the desired audience, so they started to make video creative that included models with guitars and banjos. These videos performed better than the creative that didn’t feature musical instruments.
  • Product usage: What other kinds of products and services does your ideal audience use? Thinking through what else your audience may purchase and use in life can give you a sense of their expectations of other products and services. Perhaps you offer an online meal delivery service targeted to health-food fanatics and exercise fans. Understanding the other products, such as protein bars and vitamin supplements, and services, such as gym memberships and personal trainers, that they use may allow you to highlight similar features that your product or service offers. For example, if a fancy gym offers a towel service, perhaps your meal delivery includes a higher quality napkin. If a protein bar is vegan and locally sourced, highlight that your food is also sourced from local farms. You can make creative choices to highlight those connections, reaffirming in your desired audience members that what you have to offer is something that they’d like.
  • Media consumption: Of course, media consumption is an interesting lens to think through. Your desired audience will visit certain websites, use particular apps, and be interested in topics, themes, and a variety of different types of content. The big question here to consider is whether your desired audience members use YouTube, and if they do, what do they like to watch on YouTube? You can make some creative choices based on what your audience likes to watch on YouTube.

These dimensions help you think about who you want to talk to and how to inform the video creative you make.

Tip Jot down your thoughts about your audience for each of these dimensions so that you can use these notes to guide your choices when you’re ready to buy media. YouTube offers many advanced methods of targeting the right audience. Check out Chapter 7 to find out more about buying paid media.

Gaining Insights into Your Audience

After you have a deeper picture of who you want to target (see preceding section), you can set about creating a marketing campaign that will speak to them. What you need to deliver a truly impactful marketing campaign on YouTube is a unique insight that you use to inform your creative and media that goes beyond dimensions like demographics or geography.

Remember An insight about your audience forms the basis of the messages you communicate, the video you create, the media you buy, and the actions you ask the viewer to take.

Insights

An insight is not a data point. Knowing that 55,000 people visited your website in the month of June or that 127,000 people watch your most recent quilting video are not insights. Those are interesting and potentially useful data points, but insights are more advanced than mere numbers.

An insight is

  • Based in fact, using multiple data points as supporting evidence
  • Novel and yet immediately knowable as possibly true
  • Meaningful in that you can do something with it
  • Considered by a human brain, not just pulled from a report
  • Ideally a problem your product or service can solve

Often insights are part art and part science. A great insight just feels right when you land upon it. While finding an insight can take time, when you do, it will influence your whole marketing campaign for the better.

Consider the following data points, insight, and resulting action:

  • Fictional data point: At Big City Bank, our reports show that people ages 34 to 54 spend more money than they save when they should be putting more money aside for retirement. When asked about their spending choices using a focus group and survey, people said they wanted things today, and that tomorrow seemed far away.
  • Insight: People feel that spending money is more fun than saving money for the future.
  • YouTube Marketing campaign idea: Video advertising creative can show people how saving can be fun today as well as a good idea for tomorrow.

Dove’s Campaign for Real Beauty

A well-known campaign from the soap brand Dove, part of Unilever, is an excellent example of how an out-of-sight informed the creative of an advertising campaign delivered through YouTube that became one of the most watched online ads ever. Since 2004, Dove’s brand campaign had been the Campaign for Real Beauty, which it created after undertaking a study that found some startling facts about how women perceive themselves.

Consider the following data point, which formed the foundation for the insight and on which the campaign was built:

  • Data point: The study found that only 4 percent of women, when asked, consider themselves beautiful.
  • Insight: The way women see themselves is not how others perceive them, and women can often be their own worst critic.
  • YouTube Marketing campaign idea: An FBI-trained forensic sketch artist draws the woman’s portrait, without seeing her, based purely on her description of herself. Once the sketch is complete, the woman leaves the room. Then the same artist draws the same woman but based on the description provided by another woman, who met her earlier. When the two sketches are placed side by side, the second sketch, described by the stranger, is more beautiful — and more accurate — than the self-described sketch.

This insight informed a compelling creative idea that manifested in video creative made for YouTube, lasting more than 6 minutes, delivering over 163 million views, and becoming one of the most shared videos ever, with both metrics still growing. Dove made the video in 25 different languages and uploaded it to 46 Dove YouTube channels globally. The campaign won many advertising awards and continues to resonate with new audiences who discover it today. While the video delivered on Dove’s goal of an effective brand campaign and hopefully encouraged more people to choose Dove products, it went further, giving people an important and meaningful reminder that they can be their own harshest critics.

I dare you to watch the video and not cry. Now walk over to the mirror and tell yourself you’re awesome, because you are.

Developing Audience Insights

You know your campaign will be more successful if your brief contains a compelling and actionable insight, but how do you generate insights? If you want output, you need input!

Try the following approach to collect inputs and synthesize them into insights:

  1. Collect all your existing data.

    Set about aggregating your inputs, integrating them, and looking for commonalities, patterns, trends, and themes. The more diverse the data set, often the better. Starting with what you already have is easiest — for example, grab any reports from your website, social profiles, existing videos, sales data, and more. I like to print these reports so that I can easily group them later. The idea is to gather any and all previous data, surveys, feedback from customers, and other inputs you have that may help inform your next campaign.

  2. Find more data for a fuller picture.

    A fuller data set gives you a more accurate picture and more information to work with, so go beyond your own data and look for articles and studies from third parties. See what relevant information you can find by searching on Google. In the upcoming section “The Best Tools and Resources for Insights,” I list ways to find and uncover new data points and interesting correlations, source surveys, and feedback from people, as well as how to add more data to your total data set.

  3. Sort all your data into the Four C framework.

    Take all of these various data points and inputs and start to sort them into groups. You can use the Four C framework, described in the following section, to organize your inputs.

The Four C Framework for Insights

There’s no right or wrong way to organize your data and inputs to help generate your insights. You can look for themes and commonalities or even just highlight a handful of the most interesting and useful points that you think are relevant from what you’ve uncovered. I like to use the Four C Framework to group things. It makes the mass of data you’ve assembled more manageable.

Consumer

Consumer insights deal with the individual’s mindset. Think through how individuals in your target audience are feeling, what motivates them, what are they hoping to achieve, and what encourages them to act. With consumer’s thoughts, feelings, and behaviors, you must look for the why behind those thoughts and actions. If behavior is functional, the insight, the why behind it, is the emotional.

Consider the following questions:

  • What does your target audience want most in life right now? Can you use video to explain how your offering can help them achieve something they want in life?
  • Why would they want to choose your product or service? Can you create video that extols the benefits of your offering in a clear and compelling way?
  • Why might they choose a competitor’s offering? Can video combat some of the reasons why they might choose an alternative?
  • How does your product or service make them feel? Can you use video to tap into those positive feelings and engender more good feeling?
  • What might stop them from buying from you? Can you use video to address that issue? Can video convince them otherwise?
  • How has their behavior changed over the last year? Can you use video to speak to their changing needs, wants, and actions?
  • What does your target audience like most about you? Can they tell other people on your behalf about why they love you?
  • If your customer could change one thing about your product or service, what would it be? Perhaps you’ve made some tweaks that you can use video to communicate to encourage people to buy and buy again.

Category

The category in which you operate refers to the division of business with shared characteristics. For example, if you sell specialized sporting goods online, your categories may be sporting goods for specific sports, sporting goods in general, online retailers, clothing, ecommerce, and others. Look for insights through the category lens.

When it comes to your category:

  • Are people’s behaviors changing? Are their tastes and preferences changing? Are there new ways to purchase or use products or services, new styles of product, or methods of service delivery in the category that may influence what you’re able to sell? Can you look for videos that show indications of changing category tastes?
  • What are the consumer’s expectations of this category? With regard to innovation, pricing, service delivery, and so on, what do they believe is standard practice? Does the consumer expect that videos about this category will be on YouTube? Do those videos exist?
  • What other products or services are in this category? Have any new products or services been developed? Are consumer expectations changing as a result of new developments? Can video play a role in showcasing new products or services, or can video complement or augment them?
  • Is this category growing or shrinking? Can you grow by reaching more people who are coming to this category, or do you need to grow by encouraging existing category customers to spend more money? Can video play a role in bringing more people to the category?
  • How do the seasons affect this category? Do any seasonal trends affect this category? Do people spend more or less at certain times of the year, such as during certain holidays? Would you make different YouTube video creative based on the time of the year?
  • What trends are on the rise in this category? Are new trends emerging in this category that may inform a change to your product or service or to your advertising creative, content, media, and ultimately your marketing campaign? Are people searching for videos related to these trends?
  • How does this category appear on YouTube? What videos exist on YouTube in this category? Who is making those videos, and what are the videos about? Are the videos popular? What are people commenting?

Competitor

Take a look at your competitors, the people who are in similar businesses as you, even if they are in different geographies, to see what they are doing. You can learn about your audience from how your competitor is talking to them and how they are reacting.

Think about the following questions:

  • How do our competitors market to their target audience? Does this approach tell you something about the audience you may not have considered?
  • How is their audience different from yours? Could you be reaching a different audience who might like to hear from you? Could you be talking to your audience in a different way?
  • When it comes to YouTube, which of their videos performs well? What do you think makes the video perform well? What do you like and not like about it?
  • What are people saying in the comments and on their social sites? Are people responding positively? Are they asking for something that’s not being delivered that perhaps you can provide?
  • What kinds of videos are they making? Do you think these videos are of interest and helpful to the audience? What would you do differently?
  • What do their ads look like? What’s the tone and style? Have your competitors made a creative choice that makes these ads perform well or perhaps poorly?
  • What products or services do they offer that you don’t? Are you at an advantage or a disadvantage in this regard? Are your competitors offering something the audience wants that you don’t yet offer or that you haven’t yet communicated that you do offer?

Culture

Think about what may be happening at a cultural level that can affect your target audience. The cultural lens provides the context in which all other lenses are operating within and encourages you to take a wider view of what’s influencing your audience. Cultural influences can inform and shape the beliefs, wants, and needs of your audience. Often, tapping into cultural insights will allow you to develop insights that inform your creative, your media, and your marketing campaign.

Use these questions to think through what’s happening in culture:

  • What is happening in the economy? Are people employed and earning, or are times hard? Are the costs of life’s essentials, such as food, accommodation, and transportation, going up or down? What videos are people making on this topic?
  • What is the current political landscape? How are people feeling based on the current political climate? Is it a time of prosperity or austerity? Are people feeling positive, safe, optimistic, and excited, or are they concerned about the state of the world and how it may affect them?
  • What macro trends are occurring in culture? Think about trends in fashion, news and media, entertainment, food, travel, consumerism, activism, the environment, and more. Can you tap in to any trends in videos on YouTube?
  • What are the ideas that are being discussed at a cultural level? What are the biggest issues that academics, intellectuals, pundits, and the media are discussing? What are people talking about in social media?
  • What customs are still prevalent or are newly forming? For example, are people communicating differently? One example is the rise of memes, emojis, and the like as valid methods of communication. How are people using video on YouTube?
  • How are people, as a social group, behaving differently? Are people traveling more or less? Are they spending more time at home or going out? Are more groups forming around shared interests, or are people more isolated?
  • What are people’s beliefs, feelings, and behaviors? In general, how are people’s beliefs changing? Are certain social norms or traditions being rethought? Do you have a general sense of how people are feeling about life today?

The Best Tools and Resources for Insights

Google and YouTube offer an array of incredible and freely available tools and resources that you can use to discover more about the audience you’d like to target. They can help you develop compelling insights for your marketing campaign brief.

Take a look through the following tools and resources and experiment with them:

  • The Trending Video page on YouTube and the YouTube Trends blog
  • The Google Trends tool
  • The Google Surveys tool
  • Social media and comments

Trending on YouTube

Trends can be helpful indicators of what people are responding to and watching at any given time. A few resources are available to help you track trends:

Trending video on YouTube

The trending video page on YouTube shows you the videos that are trending around the world (see Figure 3-1). You may see some videos you’d expect, such as the latest music video from a popular artist or the summer’s big blockbuster movie trailer, but you’ll also find videos that will surprise you. Think of those classic videos that trended, like the Cinnamon Challenge, Harlem Shake, and even the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge. These videos are what you may call viral videos in that they seem to spread exponentially like a virus.

Screenshot of the YouTube Trending page that updates daily displaying the latest trending videos.

FIGURE 3-1: The YouTube Trending page updates daily showing the latest trending videos.

Trending videos are specific to the country you’re in, but they aren’t personalized to you; the videos you see are the same videos everyone else will see. YouTube updates this list every 15 minutes, so it’s a super-fresh list of what’s hot. Think of the trending videos page as a top chart of what’s big right now on YouTube.

Trending videos aren’t just based on video view count, though. In addition to how many views the video has, the trending videos page can be based on

  • How quickly these videos are garnering views, which is called velocity
  • Where the views are coming from
  • The age of the video

YouTube writes:

“Even if your video meets all the above criteria, it may not appear on Trending, as many other videos may also meet those criteria. The Trending system tries to choose videos that will be most relevant to our viewers and most reflective of the broad content on the platform.”

— https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/7239739?hl=en

Oh, you can’t pay to be on this page either, YouTube doesn’t favor any particular people, and they don’t count views you get from paid media.

Tip When you look at the trending videos, look for creative inspiration to inform your video ad or content creative. Often, these videos have found some of the latest tips and tricks to snag those video views and shares. Think of them as a masterclass in good creative.

YouTube trends blog

Another useful resource is the YouTube trends blog at http://youtube-trends.blogspot.com. While the YouTube team don’t post on the blog often (at the time of writing, the last post was five months old), it still appears to be an active blog with interesting content about observations and analysis of trends on YouTube.

Search for something like #IceBucketChallenge, and you’ll find a post from 2014 that breaks down performance data of this meme or how “The Gummy Bear Song” broke 1 billion views. (I’d never heard of it either.) Think of this resource as a library of case studies of the most viral of viral videos.

Google Trends

Google Trends, shown in Figure 3-2, is gold, and time spent using this tool is never wasted. Using real-time Google and YouTube data, Google Trends lets you search for anything.

Screenshot of the Google Trends tool which is an invaluable resource to help explore trends and behaviors to help develop audience insights.

FIGURE 3-2: The Google Trends tool is an invaluable resource to help explore trends and behaviors to help develop audience insights.

Google Trends is like the world’s biggest survey, enabling you to see what people are interested in based on what they are searching for:

  • You could look for spikes around things happening in the world and then make videos that tap into those interests.
  • You can use the geographic data to look for regions you may like to target with your media. Perhaps more people search for your product or service in Wyoming, and so you’ll buy media for your video ads targeted there.
  • You can search for your brand to see whether people are searching for you, what they are searching for, and any other search terms you can tap into on YouTube.
  • You can see whether your competitor’s names come up in the related search queries box to give you an idea of who you are competing with.
  • You can use Google Trends to find products and for market research, to find a niche.

Using Google Trends

If you spend time playing with Google Trends, you’ll see how useful it is. Follow these steps:

  1. Visit http://trends.google.com and enter any search term you’d like and press Enter.

    For example, enter your favorite celebrity, a product, or a sporting event. The results page, shown in Figure 3-3, displays search interest, or the number of people searching for that phrase, over time, showing peaks and troughs.

  2. (Optional) Use the drop-down menus to change the country, timeframe (going back to 2004), or category and whether you’re looking for web search data or something else.

  3. Choose YouTube Search from the drop-down menu to see how people have been searching for this phrase specifically on YouTube.

    The menu is set to Web Search by default.

    Do you see anything revealing, such as certain times of the year when people are searching more or regions where people are searching from?

  4. Tip Scroll down to the Related Topics and Related Queries sections to see other topics and search phrases people use similar to your search.

    This information, shown in Figure 3-4, can be a source of inspiration to think through other angles, revealing what else is on people’s minds when searching.

  5. Scroll up to the top of the Results page and add a comparison search term by clicking on + Compare.

    You can compare two search terms against each other. You can even add more comparison terms, up to five in total (see Figure 3-5).

Screenshot displaying Google search results for a famous country singer depicting peaks in search interest, with the biggest peak in May 2018 when she appeared on a TV program.

FIGURE 3-3: My search for country singer Kacey Musgraves shows peaks in search interest, with the biggest peak in May 2018 when she appeared on the TV show SNL.

Screenshot displaying Google search results for related topics and related queries that allows to explore similar search terms people look for.

FIGURE 3-4: Related topics and related queries let you explore similar search terms people look for.

Screenshot displaying graphical curves representing the search interest for two famous artists, with one curve significantly higher than the other one.

FIGURE 3-5: I’ve added Taylor Swift and Blake Shelton for comparison. You can see that search interest in Taylor Swift is significantly higher than the other two artists.

Exploring even more on Google Trends

You can explore even more on Google Trends. Use the left-hand side menu to find

  • Trending Searches: This area shows you the break-out search terms that are trending for that particular day. You can switch to Real-Time Search Trends, shown in Figure 3-6, to see a top list of terms popular in the last 24 hours and drill down by geography and category.
  • Top charts: This incredible section, shown in Figure 3-7, lets you choose a country, month, and category to see tons of top charts for the top searches for actors, animals, athletes, authors, automotive, people, politicians, TV shows, songs, musicians, and more. You can choose to see data by month or by the entire year. For example, the most popular search in 2017 in the category of calories was a Unicorn Frappuccino calories.”
  • Subscriptions: Setting up some subscriptions to search terms that are relevant to you is a good idea. Enter the search term or a topic, choose your region, and set how often you want to receive emails (weekly or monthly), and Google will send you updates about those search terms. You can choose things like the Top daily search trends or All daily search trends. Staying aware of what people are searching for can help you make decisions about the kinds of videos you may need to create.
Screenshot displaying the search results of some trending topics of information from all over the world that people are interested in.

FIGURE 3-6: At any point in time, you can check out trending searches to see what the world or a specific country is looking for.

“Screenshot of top charts displaying handy lists for popular searches into different themed lists, by choosing a country, month, and category.”

FIGURE 3-7: Top charts breaks out handy lists for popular searches into different themed lists.

Use all of this data to think about how your videos can tap into people’s intents and interests, and to uncover related topics, times of the year when you may want to run your videos, and more.

Google Surveys

One of the best ways to develop insights about your audience is to ask them questions! If you’re able to hit the street, email, or call up friends, simply start asking people questions about what they like and what they want, what motivates them, what they would like to be different, and more.

If you’re looking for an easier and more scalable solution to survey people, you can use Google Surveys, which is a paid service that lets you build and run your own survey, delivering it to your target audience wherever they are on the Internet.

Tip If you don’t have budget to run a paid Google Survey, you can use Google Forms to create your own questionnaire, which you can email to friends and post on social media. Visit http://docs.google.com/forms.

Google Surveys works by enabling people to answer short surveys in exchange for access to premium content. For example, imagine you want to read an article on a popular newspaper’s website, but that content is behind a pay-wall. You may be given the option to answer a survey in exchange for accessing that content for free and not having to pay for the subscription. It’s a win-win!

You can get results within 48 hours, and the data is presented back to you in beautiful graphs and charts, making it easy to interpret the results. Remember, real people are answering your questions, so the potential to learn is enormous.

Tip You pay only when you’re ready to send your survey. You see the confirmation screen for costs after you make your various selections as to who you want to target.

Sign into your Google account and then follow these steps the first time you run Google Surveys:

  1. Visit https://surveys.withgoogle.com and click on Run a Survey.

  2. Choose your country.

    Remember to choose the country where you are located. An option later allows you to change the country where the survey will run.

  3. If you’re offered to opt in to email marketing communications, make your choice and click Next.

  4. View and accept the terms of service.

    To accept them, check the I agree box after you’ve read the terms and then click on Submit.

    You’re then able to get started building your survey.

To create a new survey in Google Surveys:

  1. Choose + New Survey.

  2. Click on the “+” button.

    You see a page that allows you to build your survey.

  3. Choose who you want to target and then click on Continue.

    You can choose options like country, age, and gender (see Figure 3-8). As you choose options, the price per completed survey will change. The more specific the audience you want to reach, the likely the higher the cost.

    After you click on Continue, you see a screen that allows you to add questions.

  4. Choose the type of question you’d like to add and then click on Add Question.

    Your choices include a single answer question, a question with multiple answers, rating scales, questions where you show an image and ask for an answer, and more.

    You return to the main survey screen.

  5. Edit the question’s text and answer options.

    Tip When adding questions, you can set up some advanced options. For more information, see the nearby sidebar “Randomization and screener questions.”

    Note that you can click on Save to save your survey’s progress.

  6. Continue adding questions and editing the text and answer options; click on Confirm when you’re finished.

    Tip To get better results, ask no more than four or five questions. While Google Surveys is a great tool to test things, it’s not as useful for lengthy questionnaires.

  7. After you create all your questions, click on Confirm to proceed.

    You see a summary Review and Purchase page, shown in Figure 3-9.

  8. Indicate how many survey responses you want to purchase and how often you want to run the survey.

    For example, you can run the survey only once for 100 times or every month for 100 times, which is great if you want the same survey to run on a regular basis for a steady flow of market research.

    Google calculates the total cost.

    Tip Before you confirm and purchase, Google Surveys may show you a screen explaining that it can test your survey to determine the cost and the audience size. This screen typically appears when you have a screening question. Google Surveys wants to make sure that enough respondents meet your criteria. For example, if your screener questions are “Is your name John? Are you 35 years old? Do you live in Tampa?” then the screener questions may be too specific! You can edit your survey to reduce the restrictions your screener questions impose. (For more on screener questions, see the nearby sidebar.)

  9. Click on Buy Now when you’re ready to proceed.

    You may be asked to enter payment information if you don’t already have that information associated with your Google account.

    Your survey will go live shortly after you’ve made payment.

Screenshot displaying the survey results of a search on specifying a target audience of a general population and the sampling options of the same.

FIGURE 3-8: Specify your target audience.

Screenshot displaying the Google Surveys window enabling one to review and purchase a survey response for which the total cost will be calculated.

FIGURE 3-9: Choose how many survey responses you want. Google will calculate the cost per response and give you a total.

Social media and comments

One of the easiest ways to discover insights about your audience is to look directly at what they’re saying on social media, such as on your Facebook page, your Twitter, or in the YouTube comments section.

Remember People show their interest with views and likes, but they express their opinions in the comments! Spend some time on your social channels or, if you don’t have any, look at your competitor’s social channels. What are people saying? Do their comments give you any clues as to untapped insights that can inform your campaign?

One way to use YouTube and the comments to help mine for insights is to create a video where you simply ask people what they think! The vast majority of popular YouTubers will end their videos by asking their audience to comment, telling them what they thought of their video, of the topic, what they’d like to see next, and so on. Maybe you can make a video and post it to your YouTube channel asking people questions that you’ll then use to inform your campaign.

YouTube Analytics, Google Analytics, and your Google Ads Reports are so important for mining insights that Part V is dedicated to them.

Tip One of my favorite resources is Think With Google. Visit www.thinkwithgoogle.com for a truly amazing and comprehensive resource, direct from Google themselves, which is teeming with consumer and marketing insights, marketing resources, case studies, blog posts, and more. Check out the Tools section (found under Marketing Resources) and you’ll find even more tools that can help you develop great insights.

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