“If you enjoyed today’s video, please like and subscribe!”
These words will forever be engrained in the minds of our generation, but does it actually work?
Sometimes…
The two things that go hand in hand when trying to grow your YouTube channel is content and audience, so with a little help of buyer personas, you can turn that sometimes into a definite yes.
What is a Buyer Persona?
A buyer persona is a representation of your ideal subscribers; the individuals who will come back time and time again to watch your videos and, potentially, refer you new subscribers. Whatever the content may be, you will always have a persona that your videos resonate with. So in that sense, it’s important to try to understand, learn, and adapt to that persona!
But before getting started, there’s one key thing to establish, so let’s get started on growing your number of subscribers and, in the process, amount of views!
Why Do People Watch Your Videos?
Figuring out exactly what your videos offer and why people decide to watch them is a necessity when trying to identify your target persona. What form of value do you provide through your content?
- Reviews of different products or services
- Inspirational videos
- Comedy or humor
- Knowledge in a specific area of discipline
As you can see, topics can range from broad to incredibly niche and specific, so be sure to recognize not only the type of content but also the delivery of it.
Understanding your role in the ideal subscriber’s life is the basis for crafting and using a persona to increase subscribers.
Ultimately, everything boils down to the content quality of your videos. If the content is valuable and presented in a way that resonates with your ideal persona, you’ll continue engaging current subscribers and improve your chances of gaining new ones.
Building a Buyer Persona
Before diving into the research needed, it’s important to understand why some buyer personas fail. Try to avoid:
- Relying on intuition alone – do your research
- Basing them on an aspirational buyer
- Not updating personas overtime
- Trying to make them one-size-fits-all
- Ignoring negative personas
- Creating them, then not using them at all
With these things in mind, the next big question is how to approach the research needed to form buyer personas. There are so many different sources to draw from so it can be an overwhelmingly complex process. A good place to start is by identifying general demographics, pain points, desired experiences, values, and goals. Here are a few ways you can get this information:
- Communicate clearly and honestly with current subscribers! Because they’re the ones who resonate with your content, it’s best to build a persona around them. Ask for feedback through your videos, take the time to read through comments or messages, and maybe even give an email for your subscribers to reach out to you personally!
- Utilize tools that offer statistical insight into how subscriber behavior translates to the web. Are your viewers finishing your videos? Do they complete a certain action that you’re trying to push for? Are there specific months, days, or times that your views or subscription rates peak?
- Take advantage of Youtube and Google searches! These two tools are easily overlooked when trying to figure out the best content, format, and style of videos within a certain query. Youtube and Google are among the largest search engines, so see which keywords you want to rank for and figure out why the top search results landed their position.
With the initial research out of the way, the next thing to think about is determining which of your subscribers are your “best audience”. This is done by determining the lifetime value of a particular subscriber. By basing your buyer personas on these individuals, you’ll be thinking long term and can focus on serving these particular subscribers. When trying to determine if a subscriber has a high lifetime value, keep the following questions in mind:
- Do they watch every single video you upload or just a select few?
- Do they have the tendency to share your videos on social media platforms?
- Do they have a large following on their social media accounts to help attract new subscribers?
Through these research methods, you’ll likely end up with a compilation of information of your subscribers and the kinds of people you want to attract.
So what exactly is the purpose of all this information that you call a buyer persona?
Content.
Whether it be thinking of new videos, creating them, or optimizing the ones you have right now, it all comes down to using buyer personas to create the right type of content for your particular audience.
Using Buyer Personas to Map Out Video Content
The last thing you want on your channel is to have every 2 out of 3 videos all talking about the same thing!
Map out your content ideas to ensure that there aren’t any redundant topics and begin forming topic clusters. Here’s a step-by-step breakdown of this process:
- Map out your buyer persona’s core problems and paint points—particularly those which you can help them solve.
- Look at these problems and thinking about your content, group them into broad topic areas that you want to be seen as experts on by your ideal audience.
- Fill in each topic with subtopics – found via keyword research. I like to use Ahrefs Keyword Explorer tool for my keyword research. You can enter your topics or subtopics in this tool, then find out what other keywords or phrases people are using when searching about this topic.
- Map out content ideas that align with each subtopic. You can start with some initial internal brainstorming to generate ideas, and then use tools to expand your list.
The goal is to organize site content by topic pillars. This signals that you are a topical expert and helps leads looking for answers related to this topic better navigate your videos.
Another key thing to keep in mind is social media!
Utilize Social Media
Video content and social media often go hand-in-hand. Widen your exposure by identifying your persona’s preferred social media channel to have better access to your audience and vice-versa. Keep in mind a few things:
- The types of people will be vastly different from one social media platform to another
- Even within a singular channel, there will be groups of individuals with varying expectations on what kind of content they will find
- Whichever tone you decide to take on, your content should resonate with the people on that particular social media channel
Increasing your subscribers comes down to two things: creating the best possible content and ensuring that it gets found by an audience that fits the persona through all possible channels. The process of tailoring your videos to the right audience and marketing them to the proper channels can become a highly targeted and effective effort with the help of buyer personas. Although the research may seem arduous at first, keeping this persona and updating them as your own platform evolves will help scale your growth even more!
