How to Build Audience Personas for Your Youtube Channel

If you are a business with a YouTube channel, you know that there are hardly any other social media sites that possess such influential power. Videos are powerful. Add that to the great behemoth that YouTube is, and there is no wonder every business wants a share of the pie. They want viewers and subscribers. Lots of them.

You find this oft-used CTA at the end of almost every YouTube video ”Please like, share, and subscribe to our channel if you liked the video.”

What is a persona?

A persona is a fictional representation of your most ideal customers. These people keep coming back to your videos. They refer new subscribers to your YouTube channel. You must understand who they are and create videos that resonate with them to attract more like them.

Why do people watch videos?

1 in 2 Gen Z’s says they “don’t know how they’d get through life” without video. That’s how important videos are in our lives. Videos do many things, from making you feel part of a community to addressing social issues. You can learn anything on YouTube.

Below are the top reasons given by people why they watch YouTube videos:

• It helps me relax and unwind
• Teaches me something new
• Allows me to dig deeper into my interests
• Makes me laugh
• Relates to my passions
• Is inspiring
• Makes me forget about the world around me
• Keeps me in-the-know

YouTube videos are also great for finding reviews about products you plan to buy or learn about a subject. The topics can range from broad to niche, depending on your chosen channels.

If the content in the video is valuable and of high quality, more and more visitors will engage with it. It will improve your chances of getting new subscribers.

How to build personas for your YouTube audience:

Before you become the next big channel on YouTube, you need to define your audience. You have to build YouTube buyer personas to be clear about who you are making those videos for. The content you create should be relevant and relatable to your personas.

Who are you?

To start with, you need to be clear about who you are and what kind of content you intend to create. Look at your past YouTube videos or content created on different platforms.

Did you feel that you catered to a particular segment of the audience? If yes, did this audience like your content.

Did you enjoy traction on the videos? Were you able to convert the casual watchers into subscribers?

Once you focus on what you want to achieve with the videos and where you are right now, you will have a clearer idea of your buyer personas.

1. Analyze voice of the viewers:

Since the people who watch your videos are the ones that relate to your content, you can build your buyer personas for your YouTube channel with them in mind. Invest time in reading through the comments they post. If they have suggestions, consider them. Ask proactively for feedback. Give them options to reach out to you.

2. Gather statistical insights:

Collect data on the viewing behavior of your followers. Are they watching all of your videos till the end? Do they drop off at a particular point? If you have a call-to-action (CTA) in the video, do they click on it? Is there a particular period when the subscriptions or viewerships peak? Do you see a pattern when there is a decline in viewership?

3. See the keywords you rank for:

Another vital step that you can do in finding your YouTube personas is to look for the keywords you rank for. You can use YouTube and Google searches to find them. Make it a point to check out the most well-received videos for the keywords you want to rank for. Find out how these top videos have been styled, their content, presentation, and format. By doing so, you will understand why these are the top videos.

4. Use an audience insights tool:

The social analytics tool on YouTube will not give you fully-developed personas. There are audience insights tools that pull data from your channel and analyze them. They are capable of pulling data from multiple social media sites.

Below are some of the details that it will flesh out:

• Education levels
• TV shows/movies they watch
• Events and Places of interest
• Psychographic data
• Advanced demographic data
• Spending power and patterns
• Challenges
• Stage of life

The above data is presented in the form of a report that will help you create new segments of the audience or your YouTube personas.

5. Insert surveys in your videos:

A highly efficient method to gather information about your subscribers is by inserting surveys inside the video. It could be inserted initially, during, or after the video. Getting survey responses from people viewing your videos adds to the credibility of the survey’s result.

You can ask the following questions:

• What kind of videos do you prefer to see?
• What encouraged you to subscribe to our channel?
• What should be the frequency with which we should create content?
• What do you think should be the ideal length of our videos?

Enhancing personas with social media data:

Even though people's behavior is different across varied platforms, there will be shared attributes. Most social media platforms have powerful analytics engines that provide your followers/subscribers with information.

Let us look at how you can enhance your YouTube personas with data from other major social media websites.

Meta insights and Twitter analytics:

You can get insights such as audience demographies/geographies and content that people have engaged with from your Facebook business page and Instagram profile. You can find age/gender and city/country distribution of your followers and view performance metrics about the users who respond to your content, and like/react/comment on your posts. With Twitter analytics, you can view activity metrics such as impressions, profile visits, mentions and followers for your tweets and videos. Further, you can track your best-performing posts and thereby identify the best time to post content.

Using the above information, you can hone your personas and refine your posts to such an extent that they resonate with them. When you compare these followers with your existing audiences, you may also find new audience segments that can be added to your buyer personas.

Delve AI’s Social Persona tool:

You can also use Delve AI’s Social Persona tool to generate rich insights about your social audiences such as Twitter – within minutes. You get the following from Social Persona tool:

Automated segmentation and multiple personas: It pulls out behavioral, psychographic, demographic, and geography-based data to segment the audience and creates personas automatically for each segment.

Audience Intelligence: It generates deep insights on your users, their behavior and interests in terms of How, What, When, Where and Who.

Sources of influence:It shows the social accounts, websites, podcasts, and YouTube channels that wield a lot of influence among your audience.

Using LinkedIn to research buyer personas:

Apart from Linkedin analytics for page visitors and campaigns, there are a few ways using which you can refine your buyer personas.

1. Find additional demographic information: Analyze your buyer persona’s profile on LinkedIn. You can search for profiles that match your buyer personas' job title and industry. Look for 10-15 similar accounts using the search feature. Gather key data such as where they studied, the companies they worked with, and their career trajectory.

2. Determine needs/responsibilities: Using the experience section from a person’s LinkedIn account, you can learn about their work responsibilities. What do their job summaries say? Have they highlighted wins or challenges they’ve overcome?

3. Recommendations: It provides key insights into how they’ve managed to impress their bosses. It will give you ways to value-add to your YouTube content to make them exceed their expectations at work.

4. The content they post: Go through the content they post and how they engage with others on the platform. If you are a B2B email marketing automation company, you might want to look for posts or comments about a pain point. You can create videos on YouTube where you show how your software helps overcome it.

How to create a video content map using YouTube personas:

If you want to develop ideas for your YouTube channel, go back to your personas. Here is a breakdown of the process so that you don’t end up working on redundant content.

Step 1: Identify your YouTube subscribers' core problems and pain points. Find out which are the ones where your knowledge will help the most.

Step 2: Based on your subscriber base's problems, group the topics identified into broad topic areas. Add them to the list if these are areas where you want to be seen as an authority amongst your ideal audience.

Step 3: Use a keyword research tool to find subtopics for each topic. Make sure you also note down the phrases or keywords your subscribers use when searching about the topic.

Step 4: Based on the subtopics you have identified, generate more ideas to expand your list.

Step 5: Create content by topic pillars. It will make you look like an expert in your niche.

How to use personas for growing your YouTube channel

If used correctly, the data collected from your YouTube personas will be a goldmine since it includes likes and dislikes, interests, challenges, goals, pain points, motivation, and purchasing behavior.

1. Content creation/strategy:

You can create a significant impact on your content creation and marketing strategy with social media personas. You can use it not only for YouTube but also for other social media channels. 72% of consumers say that they will only engage with content that is personalized to them. The more you post content that your ideal followers will be interested in, the more likely you will boost engagement rates and attract the right audience.

2. Better targeting:

When you know your ideal YouTube subscribers, you will create content specifically for them. By doing so, you would inadvertently target the right audience. The marketing copy on your YouTube videos will say everything the consumer wants to hear.

3. Improves retention:

When you offer the right content for your audience, they are most likely to stay with you. If your messaging is skewed and not relatable to your YouTube audience, they will start unsubscribing to your channel. You can easily increase your retention rate since you have details about your subscribers’ expectations because of the personas.

Offer your audience the content they came for, and you are golden.

4. Competitor research:

In marketing, you need to be one up against your competitor, and the best way to do that is by doing thorough research on their strategies. If your YouTube personas are similar to your competitor, here’s what you can do:

• Find out the most popular content on their YouTube channel
• How do they write the copy on each of their videos?
• What do the positive and negative comments on their channel say?
• How do they respond to them?
• What does their overall content strategy look like?
• What can you learn from their strategy?
• Which strategy of theirs should you avoid?

5. Run effective ad campaigns:

Buyer personas are great for ad campaigns as well. You can shape your audience segments based on the personas. Fine-tune your custom audiences by using demographic data. It is also possible to create interest-based audiences leveraging buyer personas.

Reach relevant social media users by including buyer persona data in your ads. It will give you better outcomes and increase the efficiency of your YouTube ad campaigns.

6. Connect with relevant influencers:

If you want to identify potential partners for your brand, you can add your audience's interests to an influencer marketing program. It will find out influencers whose audience is the same as yours. While you can organically form relationships with influencers, finding out whether they are the perfect fit for your brand will be difficult.

7. Better product development:

Not only are personas great for creating targeted content, but they also put you in a position to build future products or add features that suits your buyer personas. If you have well-developed personas, you can create products and services that are in tune with what your subscribers want. When you grow with respect to the changes that your subscribers want, they will stay subscribed.

8. Understanding subscribers’ needs/interests:

When you know the pain points of your audience, you can create videos in ways that they will find valuable. Using the insights based on the subscribers’ needs, you can identify more topics your prospects want to learn about. It will help create relevant and insightful content to forge your relationship with them.

Wrapping up:

Increasing your YouTube subscribers boils down to creating engaging content and being found by an audience that fits your personas. By developing buyer personas for YouTube channel, you will easily create videos for the right audience. The results of persona-focused will show in the form of an increased subscriber base.