Target the Right Audience

It's all about people (or rather the audience who's watching).

When producing video content, whether it be for marketing or training purposes, the key to unlocking it's success as a communication tool is knowing and engaging your target audience. It is imperative thatSo when Shellharbour City Council engaged Global Pictures to produce their economic development corporate video, we pitched them our plan to produce two cuts: 

1) A stylised story driven film lead by an emotive soundtrack and minimal voiceover to convey our characters' journey to success as valuable and contributing members of the local community, aimed at the broader audience and distributed via social media channels, and 

2) A version of the 1st film that used in depth voiceover narration throughout the film to convey a detailed message to be delivered to specific stakeholders, such as new businesses looking to move into the local government area. 

Clearly there were two distinct audiences to tackle with this production and we wanted to ensure each version of the video would do exactly that. 

Putting the message first, Economic Development in Council's words is "all about people". This couldn't be truer and made it even more crucial that we thought long and hard about who our two audiences were when scripting each version of the film.

On the one hand our social media audience is the everyday person and not necessarily someone looking to start a business or invest. They are the people who live in the local community or want to move into the area and their need is to know the broader brush stroke that Council are painting to ensure the growth of their community. On the other hand, businesses looking to invest in the area want to know what Council is doing to cultivate economic development in the LGA, and they want to know this in detail. 

To put it in simple terms - the wider audience would be bored with a video narrated with corporate video speak aimed at business stakeholders. Our solution was to find a way to cost effectively deliver a video to each audience by only changing the voiceover and leaving the vision the same.

The resulting video comprises a beautiful montage of imagery, opening with a sunrise (filmed at Shellharbour beach), diving into the stories of a few people (such as the school leaver who, after gaining her education from local providers, goes on to gain employment within the area), and ending with a lifestyle. The overarching message being "economic development, it's all about people".