The 'target audience' embodies the characteristics that your perceived audience will have. This is defined by age, gender, interest, location etc.
Continue on to learn about the industry expectations when creating and advertising a film.
Without accurate planning and a precise marketing campaign to the target audience, films such as Star Wars would not become the historical films that are remembered in all corners of the world.
Star Wars' marketing campaign was strategically targeted towards all generations: young, old and in between.
When identifying the target audience of your film, there are 2 important ideas to consider:
- ‘Everybody’ is not the definition of a target audience.
- Fellow filmmakers are not your target audience. They do not bring you the profits.
Why? When distributors, investors or producers hear words to describe the film as ‘universal’, ‘loved by all’, ‘one for all ages’, they will most likely stay away from putting forth any deal, let alone a good one.
Also, fellow filmmakers, although their support is important, are not going to be the ones buying billions of tickets to watch your film.
So, let us follow the steps to define your target audience
Step 1
Ask yourself questions
When asking yourself questions, be in the mind frame of asking honestly, not guiding what you want the answer to be. If you cannot ask yourself these questions honestly, you are setting yourself up to fail.
- What makes this film unique?
- Why would people choose this film over hundreds of similar works?
- What is this film truly about?
Step 2
Refine the concept
This is where you flesh out the main ideas of the film. The concept must be identified now for the rest of the questions to flow easier and clearer. Use this time to refine your film’s concepts: the area of interest that it encompasses.
Step 3
Conduct a search
Now is your opportunity to understand where the people interested in your film are. Using multiple methods and resources, research places that unite people who might be interested in your film. Create a list of publications and online resources and once you have created this list you can contact their managers, asking for the demographic information regarding their readers. This is where you will identify the age, gender and other basic demographic data that will create the foundations of your target audience.
If budget allows, psychographic research is fantastic for understanding your target audience even better. You will be able to look more closely at factors such as personalities, values, attitudes, interests and lifestyle.
Step 4
Test and refine
You are all geared up with your data. Now is the time to sum up all of your groundwork. Do this by setting up 3-5 categories of the audience who are potentially genuinely interested in a film product of yours. With this data, it is time to test--only after careful testing will you more accurately know who is interested in your new film and why.
Conduct some questions, invite people from your potential target groups for personal interviews, go with this market research to the social media platforms.
The earlier that you can define your target audience, the more time you will have for setting up, developing and implementing a successful marketing campaign. This will directly influence your final film sales! Remember all those contacts you collected earlier on? These are great to use to spread the word about your project.
A persona is a fictional character that you create to represent a user within your target audience. This information can be collected as identified in the steps above. Personas allow you to develop your marketing and advertising to personally appeal to your target audience.
Persona example
Using the information we have just been through, create a menu in Canva for Christina Chua.
This menu will be a selection of films that, based on Christina's profile, you believe would identify her for your target audience.
