3 Key Tips to Interact with your Audience during Creative Concept Development
Whether for a charity video production or commercial video project, our creative approach ensures impactful storytelling
When a new tv-show is in development, the pilot episode is a key stage of the process. These stand-alone episodes are used to test the audience response. If the pilot is successful, it’s often used as the first episode of the series. Pilots are an excellent way to validate your creative concept before spending a huge amount on producing 8, 12 or 24 full episodes.
If you are investing in a single video for your homepage, there is often little room to do a ‘pilot’ episode since you’re only commissioning a single video. And in a commercial environment, getting your message heard and appreciated by your audience is essential to reach your marketing goals.
However, there are some steps you can take to make sure your audience appreciates your content. Below are three key moments in pre-production that will enhance the quality of your video.
Talk To Your Audience
This first step might seem obvious, but could be easily forgotten. It is vital that your message resonates with your audience. To make sure it does, you have to know your audience. Talk to them and try to find out what makes them tick, what gets them excited. Why do they use your product or service and how does it improve their lives? Try to understand the context of use from their perspective. Don’t just focus on your own views. This will help you to build your story and develop the concept of your video.
Concept Validation
So you’ve been working on a creative concept and you’re ready to start filming. Before you do, take a big step back. Have you validated the concept with your audience? A simple focus group or quick interview will do wonders for the quality of your concept. Present your concept in a few key phrases to your target audience and see how they respond to it. This might lead to some amends to the general concept, and a brief retreat ‘back to the drawing board’, but it is far more likely that your video will lead to better results. It is important not to develop your concept too much. A general plot line will suffice. Use the feedback on your plot line to then develop the script.
Script Validation
The final step before filming, within the context our current ‘tv pilot’ analogy, would be to validate your script with a few key members of your audience. Based on this feedback, you can make your final amends and improve your script the best way you can. In this phase, you are not looking to make any major changes to the general creative concept or story. Instead you’re looking to see if the script actually fits the plot. But more importantly – does the audience feel the same? Once you’ve got this final validation of your script from you are ready to film and edit.
It’s Time For You To Take-Off
These three steps might seem somewhat long-winded, but especially if you are working on a tight budget, best make sure that the end result meets its goals. There is only one chance to make a good first impression and if your video is the first thing your audience will see on your homepage, better make it count. It might not be possible to create an actual pilot video, but with these three steps, you’re improving your chances for success.
