Audience testing video
The practice of audience testing for advertising evolved in the 1960’s, a process for creative concepts to be tested before going live. In the commercial world, this is still best practice today, however most video marketing isn’t tested at all before going live.
What is audience testing?
Audience testing is essentially a dress rehearsal for your video content. It involves showing your video (or concept) to a small sample of your target audience before production, or launch. Their feedback helps you refine, tweak, and optimise the video for maximum engagement.
Test the concept, or the edit?
Testing the video edit will give you the most useful feedback to the video, however if the feedback is “they don’t like it”, you will have filmed and edited a video that isn’t right for your audience!
The best practice is to test multiple creative concepts first, to refine and choose the best direction. It can be a ‘back of a napkin’ concept, or fully scripted with storyboard and supporting visuals, but the more you can show, the more useful the feedback will be.
Once then the video is produced, you can then retest to help refine the edit, tailor the call to action etc.
Why consider audience testing for video?
It could save you time and money.
Video production can be expensive, so producing a video that won’t work will be time and budget wasted. Let alone if you were to launch a campaign, pumping advertising spend behind a video that your audience won’t engage with.
Save embarrassment!
No one wants to launch something that doesn’t work. Especially in the modern age, where you need to do things bold to get attention. Ensuring you make the right bold decisions is important, and audience testing can give you some reassurance before making a decision.
Small improvements
Minor tweaks to improve engagement, audience retention and follow through, could have huge impact on your ROI. When promoting a video to an audience, as little as a 5% difference in conversion can be huge, especially when that can be repeated time after time.
How to audience test your video?
Identify the target audience and segment them if necessary. Source a small group of this audience to participate in a focus group, do a survey, or even A/B testing.
Determine what metrics you want to measure, prepping questions to ask and how best to collect that data. Presenting them with the video and any further information that would be useful.
If in doubt, search for an audience testing company to undertake this for you. Audience testing is something we have seen great value in over the years, and we can often be surprised by an audiences preferred creative direction!
Audience testing in summary
Audience testing isn’t just for big brands with deep pockets, it’s something that you should consider if you are serious about video marketing. A little extra effort and due diligence upfront can ensure you get maximise impact from your video marketing. Whether testing is done internally, or something you look to request in addition from your production partner or creative agency.