A report from the Jun Group suggests that audience targeting is among the most important elements of a successful video marketing campaign.

Identifying a clear target audience and understanding its motivations for buying are among the most important factors for a successful video content marketing campaign. According to a study from the Jun Group, a pre-roll question to learn more about a prospect for effective video targeting helped marketers boost engagement for video content by 13 percent. The report found users receiving a qualifying query before a video was served interacted with the sponsoring brand 3.94 percent of the time compared to 3.5 percent among those that did not receive a question.

While a pre-screening question isn’t feasible for every video marketer, the findings demonstrate the importance of understanding a target audience. Creating video content most likely to appeal to a prospects can keep them watching measurably longer, as well.

Marketers often try to keep videos as short as possible, but the study suggests focusing on delivering relevant content of any reasonable length will likely increase engagement. According to the study, 87 percent of consumers who started watching a video longer than two minutes completed the clip.

Marketers often try to keep videos as short as possible, but the study suggests focusing on delivering relevant content of any reasonable length will likely increase engagement. According to the study, 87 percent of consumers who started watching a video longer than two minutes completed the clip. Engagement, as far as clicking through to a site or social page, remained fairly steady for properly targeted video of all measured lengths. Clips of between 30 and 60 seconds received engagement 4.5 percent of the time, while those longer than 2 minutes saw a secondary action 3.72 percent of the time.

In terms of the secondary actions, 31 percent of consumers clicked to a Facebook Page, 28 percent navigated to a company’s site and 21 percent opted to watch the video again. The poll results suggest marketers pairing video with social media marketing and other channels succeed in moving consumers along conversion funnels.

Hitting the right notes with video marketing requires careful strategic planning, but the effort helps brands appeal to users in a format they’re consuming more frequently. Brafton recently highlighted data from comScore that found Americans watched more than 47 billion pieces of video content on the web in August.

Joe Meloni is Brafton's former Executive News and Content Writer. He studied journalism at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and has written for a number of print and web-based publications.