How To Reach An Audience

So how do you reach an audience? 

Anyone who’s ever made a piece of content and published it has worried about it reaching the intended audience.  What if no one sees, hears or reads it?  All that work for nothing.  And worse than that there’ll be no results. Other than you pulling your hair out.

But with a good plan before you start you can avoid the sad sound of… “cue crickets”

If you figure out who your audience is and where they are online before you start, and you craft your message into a great story that’ll interest them- you’re already half way there.

Mike and Sue have spent many years creating online content that connects and resonate with audiences all around the world.  They’ve had to think through strategies and conduct research time and again to ensure that the content they make does reach an audience. 

In this episode of the Moonshine Moonshot podcast, they’re talking about reach, how to get to your audience and its packed full of tips and tricks including what the different platforms are good for. 

📩 Want to stay up to date with the latest? Head to www.thedocumentaryfilmmaker.com to join our weekly newsletter and get all resources to make you the best impact filmmaker in the business. 

Find & Follow The Documentary Filmmaker on social:
Website: www.thedocumentaryfilmmaker.com
Facebook:
Instagram: @TheDocumentaryFilmmakerPodcast
LinkedIn: Sue Collins [Host] || The Documentary Filmmaker [ Company Page]

Transcript

Copy Transcript Copied

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Hi, welcome to the Moonshine Moonshot Podcast. We're here to try and move humanity forward and we're going to be talking about making an impact. And today's episode is all about reach. How do you reach an audience? I'm your host Sue Collins and this is Mike Hill.

SPEAKER_00 0:15

Yeah, we're from Moonshine Agency, Moonshine, Moonshine, Mike, Sue. We're here to talk about Moonshots and making the impossible happen because we feel like video is one of the best ways to make a difference in the world. And today we want to talk about reaching your audience because I think one of the number one mistakes

Why do you need a release strategy?

SPEAKER_00 0:34

that we see people make is they make great content but they don't have a release strategy. So today we're going to talk all about release strategy.

SPEAKER_01 0:42

Fantastic. So reaching an audience is a huge part of what we do, and it's um it's something that we've experimented with all kinds of different things over the past years. We've been doing with Moonshine for about 10 years now, and um we've done everything from hosted screenings to uh online through your Facebooks and Instagrams and all your social platforms through to email newsletters and um any and everything in between, print magazines, um media. I I can't even think of anything else. We've literally tried everything to reach people.

SPEAKER_00 1:19

Yeah, and it's a tragedy when you make a piece of great content, particularly a piece of great video content, and it fails to reach an audience. There is nothing sadder to me in this world than a video that reaches no one. So we're gonna talk about how that is never gonna happen to you and your productions, and it doesn't need to. I mean, this has got to be the greatest time in the history of man and womankind to release video product because we're all watching it all the time. There are so many opportunities, and that's what we're gonna talk about today.

SPEAKER_01 1:52

Yeah, absolutely. And I think the the first step, which we actually have talked about in another podcast, is audience.

You've got to know your audinece.

SPEAKER_01 1:58

You've got to know who your audience is because you can't reach people if you're not talking to the right people. People will only tune into information that they actually are interested in hearing. So once you know who your audience is, so we're gonna assume that at this point you've figured out who you want to talk to and why you want to talk to them, and so we're gonna really hone in on how you find them to then give them what you need to give them.

SPEAKER_00 2:22

Yeah, and if you want that breakdown on audience, you know, you should catch up with that podcast on strategic communication planning because it really drills down on a lot of how you break that down and actually define who your audience is. But today we're gonna be using a case study uh from

The Queen Victoria Market Case Study

SPEAKER_00 2:38

Queen Victoria Market. So, for those of you who haven't been to Melbourne or Australia, Queen Victoria Market is an iconic market. It I would say the most iconic market in the country. It attracts millions of people from the city of Melbourne, but also from abroad every year. It is an absolute icon, wouldn't you say?

SPEAKER_01 2:58

Oh, absolutely. I mean, having grown up in Melbourne, obviously I'm very familiar with the market and I'd spent actually a lot of time there in my younger years and when I went to uni when was going through the city, but um to reconnect with the market through doing this project, it was a really interesting experience for me because um what they're doing in there and um how they understand their customers and what they're trying to do to reach their customers is really interesting, and they're coming at it more from a marketing perspective, um, and they engaged us to help make videos to speak to their audience. So um it was a yeah, it was a really fun project, and um, I certainly know a lot more about Big Market now than I ever thought that I would.

SPEAKER_00 3:40

And full disclosure, I mean, we were working with Meg and a great marketing team. Shout out to you, Meg. We were having a great time working with a team that had established good presence online already through their website and through some of their social media platforms that we're working on. Audience building, uh platform building is part of what video does, of course. Um, but maybe we'll do another podcast specifically on how to develop platforms. But this podcast is not about that. It's about how do you make sure that the videos that you produce get to the audience you need to reach. So let's talk a bit about the audience that the market was trying to reach this year.

SPEAKER_01 4:20

Absolutely. So um obviously they get a lot of tourists, it's a very big tourist destination, but also a really big part of their market is the locals. You know, they want locals coming into the market. There's such a huge population growth in the city of Melbourne now that it is, you know, people coming home from work, buying going, buying lunch on their way to work, you know, it is just such an accessible place for anyone who spends time in the city. So they were really conscious of um a lot of building development going on in and around the markets and letting people know that they're still open for business. And how what was the what was the way they were going to tell people they were open for business and help people get excited about coming into the market and and you know um being part of that whole vibe and everything that goes on there?

SPEAKER_00 5:08

Yeah, that's it. And they didn't want to overlook their market of tourists, particularly tourists coming from China, which uh makes up a really big component of visitors to the market. But for those of you who've never been to this place that we're talking about, for background, it is huge, it's not just a food market, it has everything. Like it is one of the greatest markets you can imagine in terms of being able to uh, you know, to buy anything there. That also is a bit of a challenge, right? Because you've got people that are interested in some things and not others, so we really had to manage that. And when the marketing team came to us, they really wanted to be quite agnostic about showing different parts of the market. So let's give a bit of an overview on what we produced. We produced a series of films called Hidden Stories of the Queen Victoria Market. Why hidden stories?

SPEAKER_01 6:00

Well, this was uh this was really interesting on their behalf that they tapped into this because um it's even if you're a local to Melbourne, it it's that the store the market's such a historical place, it's been there for such a long time, and there are families who work in the market who've had stalls for generation on generation, and you know, they've know the other stall holders, their families have known each other for years, there's been marriages, there's been all kinds of you know relationships have developed over the years, and um, just the traders themselves and the relationships that they have with customers that have gone on for generation after generation. So there's all these beautiful kind of connections going on around in the market that um I just don't think most people would even realise if you were just brass, you know, wishing through to grab some tomatoes or whatever you're doing.

SPEAKER_00 6:49

Yeah, and it was really important that we reminded the audience of locals about what they love about the market. Uh, and we also wanted to connect with those visitors that were coming to town as well. So the story we're going to tell is about reach. Uh, in terms of how many people did these videos reach. We made 10 of these hidden stories in different versions, in different languages. We also made a promo video that hasn't released at the time of recording this, uh, and a video about their ultimate foodie tour, which I think are included in these numbers. So let's call it a series of roughly 11 videos with versions. I don't think they've all been released at this point. Uh, and so far, 30 weeks into the campaign, we have reached drum roll, please, 600,000 people. So 600,000 people who were not thinking about the Victor Queen Victoria Market have been touched by these videos. So 600,000 over 30 weeks. We're gonna break it down for you. We're gonna describe how we, you know, produce content that the marketing team were then able to put out there to the world across various platforms to reach that many people and make a real impact on attracting people to keep engaging with this amazing Melbourne icon.

SPEAKER_01 8:05

Yeah, sure. Um just trying to work through what you were just saying there, there's a lot to unpack there. So um, when we're thinking about, you know, I I guess I just want to clarify when for

What is versioning and why do it?

SPEAKER_01 8:19

a lot of people may not understand what we're meaning by versions when you're talking about um films. So a version can be you make a two-minute film and then you might make a one-minute cut-down of that film, and that one might be for Instagram, one might be for Facebook, um, one might be subtitled in Chinese language, one might be put um, you know, it is and one might be cut to 15 seconds for an ad or something. So that's what we're talking about. We're talking about versions, and all of those versions go out, and then that was the of all of those versions, the reach was what did you put something? 600,000, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 8:52

600,000 so far. At last count, 30 weeks into the campaign. So let's start off with, yeah, we'll go into those versions, but we'll start off with why a series. Why would you make a series and not just a single video? Well, the reason is that we're consuming so much of this stuff online, video, uh, and we have uh, you know, a strong appetite to consume this thing, and we are trying to touch different parts of the target demographic there. So the strategy that we cooked up with the marketing team at Queen Victoria Market was to do just that, to tell different hidden stories from different places around the market, and they were themed in different ways.

SPEAKER_01 9:33

Yeah, that's right. So it really tied in with their um marketing that's going on and with all the different themes of life's more authentic and all these really nice kind of um phrases to explain what the experience of being in the market is like, and then the videos represented all those different areas, and you know, one of the beauty of doing the series is that they can um let them out, as you say, release them, you know, over a period of time. People can um consume them, they can go and watch all of them at once, or they can watch them as they come out. Um, and the advantage to that is that if you made all of those 10 stories in one video, it could have been 20 to 30 minutes long, and that's a lot for someone to sit down and watch. But if you just give them two minutes and you tell a great story in two minutes, they can learn a lot about whatever that was, and then next time they come back and they'll spend two minutes and they'll learn all about the Amazing Cooks for Books bookstore instead of um you know the dairy hall or whatever it is that's going on. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 10:34

Shout out to Tim at Cooks for Books. I mean, uh so books for cooks, I always get that the wrong way around. So let's talk about the types of themes that the market were picking up on so that they could tap into different parts of their target audience. So there were things like community, family, multicultural, sustainability. So as you can see, we were inspired by this brief that it should be a bit like humans New York, you know, this really authentic storytelling around uh true stories from the market. And then we picked up on different themes like community and sustainability, which would hit different parts of their target market. And as you say, we produced uh videos around two minutes long, and that was the long version, and that was actually the destination video that we used and uh housed on the Queen Vic Market website, uh, and then we created shorter versions that funneled people into that long version. So, how did we do that? We created shorter versions that were suitable for Facebook and Instagram in particular, because these were two super important platforms for the market. So, what are your thoughts on making videos for those platforms?

SPEAKER_01 11:44

Oh, well, I think I think it's um they're two, obviously, two of the most popular social media platforms. Um, but again, it comes back to knowing where your audience is. The Queen Vic Market knew that they already had a really good um base on Facebook and on Instagram, so it was a natural fit for making videos that would suit those platforms. But um, you know, it could be LinkedIn, it could be Pinterest, it could be, you know, there's so many different variations and options. Twitter, you can tailor content for all these different platforms. Again, it really comes back to who's your audience and where are they. Um, I think they might have even used um for the Chinese audience, didn't they use um one of the phone apps?

SPEAKER_00 12:23

Yeah, WeChat. Yeah. Yeah, so because the Chinese market should not be overlooked uh in the market analysis here, uh, we created videos with burnt-in Chinese subtitles, meaning the subtitles in Chinese uh are always on screen at the bottom, and those were then uploaded to WeChat. So I wasn't able to get the WeChat stats in the 600,000, so that may have pushed it up well above that. Um, I think it's important, you know, to talk about those numbers and uh compare them to other videos that the market had already released. So these this particular series really outperformed uh some of the other videos that have been put up by the market in the past. And I think part of the reason for that was that it really tapped into that community spirit. They were very shareable, they were tapping into some of those values, those universal values that people who shopped at the market love about the place. So they were more inclined to share it and talk about it, and the levels of interaction were great.

SPEAKER_01 13:22

Yeah, and I think that's a really good point that you're making is that um that that reach component really does come back through when you're looking at a platform like Facebook, and sharing is a huge part of how that platform works. People sharing that content with their friends and that grows the reach. So um if you're doing short web-based videos, being able to share them is having having content that people want to share is really important. Um, Instagram gets a lot of interaction, you know, likes and comments, and but it's not shareable in quite the same way. So the reach comes from people seeing it in their news feed and then it getting promoted in the news feed and then finding it that way. Whereas Facebook you can find things because someone shares it with you or they tag you, or so you know, there's slight variations in the way they do these platforms do reach different audiences, and that's probably a whole different podcast altogether about the way these different platforms work. But again, it's it's understanding that you need to create shareable content if you're trying to get a really broad reach.

SPEAKER_00 14:29

That's right, and the analytics really showed that as well. So Facebook was the biggest in terms of view count. Uh, I think there was no or minimal sort of advertising spend around this content, um, which is great, you know, when you don't have to do too much advertising, that's the best. And I think those Facebook algorithms really support engagement, comments, shares, likes, etc. So uh it was getting all of that type of stuff. The engagement levels were high, which meant that Facebook was able to serve it out to more people across their network, hence more views. I think the next best performer was Instagram after that, uh, for the reasons that you identified. Um, WeChat We Don't Know, and then YouTube was next, uh, which was the sort of destination video on the website. But of course, you know what a great impression. People have come to your website, they're consuming these amazing stories there, and they can find out everything they need to know about you.

SPEAKER_01 15:26

Yeah, that's right. And and reach with YouTube's really quite a different thing as well, because with YouTube you can actually optimize it for your search terms, and um people can, you know, type into Google um, you know, Queen Victoria Market, and up will come videos or um written content, and then they click on it. So if you're doing all that sort of back-end optimization, YouTube's gonna serve you really, really well. And it's it gets a more organic reach in that way because people can discover it through through search, be it Google or whatever else you're using.

SPEAKER_00 16:01

Yeah, let's veer off down that path for a minute for people that don't know that YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world after Google. Uh, of course, YouTube is also owned by Google, which means that when you put a video on YouTube and you put that metadata around it or that information that allows Google to find it, then Google will serve it up preferentially in search. So it's more likely to be seen on search, in this case around Queen Victoria Market. So I think that's what I love about YouTube. You know, it's the long game. If you've got great content, you publish it to YouTube, you're not gonna see those huge numbers that you get off Facebook and Insta. No, because they work in a different way.

SPEAKER_01 16:43

Especially not in the

Facebook and YouTube- why use both?

SPEAKER_01 16:44

initial unless you've already got a really big subscriber base to begin with.

SPEAKER_00 16:48

Yeah, that's right. You know, you don't need to boost them like you sometimes do on Facebook as well, you know, to get the reach that you're going for. Um, but you get this great long tail with YouTube because of that searchability. So you find that's like the tortoise in the hare. You know, Facebook just kills it out of the gate. Um, but you know, it it it's it's not as vital for as long. Whereas YouTube can just go and go and go and build for years if you want to keep that content online. Um, and often, you know, if we check in on these videos in a year, you know, I wouldn't be surprised to find that YouTube is now the top performer after a period of time.

SPEAKER_01 17:24

Yeah, and it also develops that long tail because obviously the YouTube links, unless you're using Vimeo, of course, as well, but if you're using YouTube, you're gonna use that video to embed in your website. And so when people come to your website and they click on the video, it increases your YouTube um uh views. So it YouTube just functions in a pretty different way and it finds your audience or your audience finding it in quite a different way.

SPEAKER_00 17:49

Yeah, they're all good guys, and you know, as you said, there are many other platforms that are great and should be explored depending on your market and where your market is. Uh so in the case of this story, the market was on you know, WeChat, Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube. So that's uh what we publish too. Um, and you know, I'm so proud of this series. I just think it's really heartfelt. I want to talk a little bit about duration, you know. Often people say what's the perfect duration for videos, so maybe we should break that down a little bit. So there's a lot of great stats uh out there. You know, you can go to YouTube and you know um to find out some information about this. Uh I don't think there's like a magic answer to this one. What's the right duration? But for this particular series, what we ended up landing on was the longest films we made were somewhere between 90 seconds or a minute and a half and two and a half minutes long. So that was where the long ones sat. And we saw really good engagement around those, and you can actually, you know, track this and see if people have watched right through to the end of the videos, and that's a good duration to get people to watch the whole video and get to the all-important call to action at the end.

SPEAKER_01 18:56

Yeah, that's right. And so you are a bit limited on Instagram, obviously, videos need to be under a minute, but then there's Instagram stories, which is a whole different thing again. Um, and I think with you know, Facebook they do prefer shorter form content, um, although that is changing somewhat. Um, and YouTube you can obviously make much longer form content as well. So it really comes back to knowing your audience and how much would your audience want to consume and what's the type of content, and can you tell the story? So I think all of these factors are really important, and I I don't personally get too hung up on duration because I think it's about the content. If you've got really good content, people are gonna watch it, and if they watch it for a minute or if they watch it for two and a half minutes, it's all just gonna come back to how engaging is that content. And if you've got something brilliant, they're gonna stick around and watch it if it's 10 minutes. So I think it's about again, it's just understanding the platform, understanding who the audience is, and understanding whether your story is engaging enough to carry a particular duration.

SPEAKER_00 20:02

Yeah, I think it was a good choice. I think it was a good duration for this type of storytelling. It was enough to get that emotional response and want to share it with your community, and that's what it was all about. Hey, I want to share this with you because it's amazing about um, you know, uh people who are artists, you know, working at the market or you know, about you know, someone who's connected to the family stories at the market, you know. So uh it was enough to get the story across. And then for Instagram, I think we did produce these videos all under one minute, which I'm not sure that's still the Insta standard, but you know, it has been up until recently that Insta videos could only be a minute in duration. We also created some uh vertical format videos for Insta Stories, also they were pretty short. Um, and for Facebook we also went sub one minute. It was just seen as the best way to funnel people through to the site and the longer video and where they could experience that on the market website.

SPEAKER_01 21:02

Yeah, so I I'm not sure I've got much more I can add on reach without really starting to drill into much more detail on you know different areas of around audiences and nuances of different platforms, and um, so I think the key takeaways from the conversation we've been having would be firstly know who your audience is, where to find them, what platforms, try and define that right up front when you before you even roll the camera. Um, then make sure you've got a really good story to tell, um, and then package that story up in the right duration. Series is great if you've got longevity with that. Um, and then the next point would be to figure out if you need to subtitle it into different languages as well, which is really effective depending on who your audience is again.

SPEAKER_00 21:49

Always critical to get closed captions made for anything that's going to be released online, not only for the accessibility of the audience so as many people can consume it as they can, um, but it just really supercharges the performance of those videos as

Why analyse the reach?

SPEAKER_00 22:05

well across platforms like Facebook and YouTube.

SPEAKER_01 22:08

Yeah, and then I think it's probably a whole different podcast again. We might go into how to actually analyze that reach, how to know who you've reached and how to really hone in on who your demographic is. Because sometimes actually, after you've done all this work thinking of who's your audience and where are they, and then you get the analytics and you go, Oh, that's surprising. I didn't I didn't expect to to hit that market. Yeah, so um analyzing the results is really important.

SPEAKER_00 22:34

Yeah, you might be really hot on a couple of platforms but want to branch out and try something new. And a campaign like this gives you a great opportunity. You might already have good presence on a couple of platforms, but you identify a new one and you've got all this fantastic content coming out, and it's gonna absolutely launch that platform's, you know, uh, ability to grow an audience and engage an audience super quick. So think about that. You know, sometimes people get a little stuck on no, these are our platforms and that's it. Well, you know, why not add one more into the mix and see how it goes? Yeah, you know, maybe LinkedIn is good for the market, who knows? A lot of professionals in the city that you could target uh who might be going there for lunch or shopping there after work. So, you know, there are so many opportunities for video, and never again should we see videos not reach audiences because in this day and age there is absolutely no excuse, just a little upfront planning is required, and then get into it, have fun, make great content, and you know, 600,000 views in you know 30 weeks, that ain't bad, you know. So if you're looking for results like that, absolutely think about video as part of your next campaign.

SPEAKER_01 23:44

Yeah, and you'll be able to reach them, you will find them. This is a little gem we actually found at the market. For those on the podcast, you can't see it. It's a beautiful little telescope. So, thank you so much for joining us, and uh, we hope you've really enjoyed today's episode. And um, if there's any questions, please leave them for us. It's really helpful for us to know what you want to know more about. And if you have been inspired, please do leave us a review. It really helps with us reaching more audience. There you go, reach.

SPEAKER_00 24:13

I want to finish up with a big shout out to Queen Victoria Market, QVM.com.au. This place is awesome. If you're ever coming to our part of the world, get down to Melbourne and see this Queen Victoria Market. It is amazing. QVM, Queen Vic Market, we call it. Absolutely, you know, got to be on your bucket list. And thanks to Meg and the whole marketing team there for allowing us to be part of this and share this story.

SPEAKER_01 24:39

And um, if if you want the links, we'll put them in the show notes as well.

SPEAKER_00 24:42

See you next time.