How to Define the Target Audience for Your Film

It is tempting to treat the audience as a marketing question, to be settled once the film is cut. By then, most of the decisions it should have shaped have been made.

• The Budget

  The money a film has to pay back comes, in the end, from the people who watch it: directly, or through the companies that buy the film to show it. A modest audience you can reach can repay a modest budget. A large budget needs a large audience, plus the marketing money to reach it. Knowing your audience tells you which film you can afford to make.

• The Financing

  Funders want to know who the film is for, and some say so in their guidelines. Late in its assessment, the British Film Institute's Discovery funding, which backs fiction features by debut directors, interviews filmmaking teams on "the creative proposal, production plan and audience and festival intentions" (BFI (opens in a new tab)).

• The Sale

  Sales agents, distributors and platforms all have to sell your film again, to buyers or to viewers. A clear audience is the argument you hand them. Without one, they have to build that argument themselves.

• The Film Itself

  Casting, running time, age rating, title and poster are all easier to decide, and cheaper to get right, when you know who the film is for.

• The Marketing

  An audience takes time to build. If you know who it is during development, you can start reaching it during the shoot rather than after the premiere.

A target audience you can work with has three parts.

• The core audience is the people who will come first and bring others with them. They are specific enough to find and to count: you could name films they already love and the places, online or off, where they hear about the next one. Aim for one core audience, two at most: each extra one splits a small marketing budget further.

• The wider audience is the people who may follow if the core audience responds, through reviews, word of mouth, awards or a platform's recommendations. On an independent budget, you cannot pay to reach them all. The core audience brings them to you.

• The people in between are the festival programmers, sales agents, distributors, platforms, broadcasters and funders who stand between the film and its viewers. They are not your audience, but they are the first people who have to say yes, and each of them chooses films with an audience of their own in mind. Your audience definition is what shows them that your film fits.

In the Content Model Canvas (the Canvas), a one-page business plan for films, series and games, the block that holds all this is called Audience / Client. The people who watch a film and the people who pay to carry it to them are often not the same, and a plan needs both.

Night Shift Chorus is an independent comedy-drama about the night staff of a city hospital who start a choir to keep their ward from closing. The script is ready, the director is attached and the producer is putting the finance plan together.

Her first answer to "who is it for?" is the familiar one: anyone who loves a feel-good film. The pitch deck says the same. The budget has grown to pay for a well-known lead, and the plan is a wide cinema release after a premiere at a major festival. When a sales agent asks who will buy the first tickets, she has no answer anyone could act on.

So she starts again from what makes the film different. It is set in a hospital, but it is not a hospital drama: the choir is the story. That points to people who sing in amateur choirs. They would see themselves on screen, they already rehearse together and they already perform for friends and family, so they could come as a group and bring an audience of their own. She weighs hospital staff too, but judges them harder to reach as a group, so they join the wider audience.

She tests the idea before she rewrites anything. She screens a short teaser at a few choir rehearsals near the production office, looks at how comparable feel-good films about ordinary groups of people were released, and talks to a distributor that runs event screenings.

The script stays the same. Almost everything around it changes:

• The budget comes back down. A famous lead matters less to an audience that comes for the choir, so the money goes into the music and the singing scenes.

• The festivals change. Instead of waiting on one major premiere, she aims for festivals with audience awards and public screenings, where a crowd-pleaser can prove itself.

• The release is built around the core audience: screenings where a local choir sings before the film, and a singalong version for choir outings.

• The marketing starts on set. Choirs are invited to record the film's closing song, and their versions become the film's first posts on social media.

• The pitch deck opens with the audience and how to reach it, so a sales agent sees who will buy the first tickets before seeing the cast list.

None of these changes needed a bigger budget. They needed a clear answer to who the film is for, found before the shoot.

The audience is where a film's business plan starts, not where it ends. Once you know who the film is for, the rest of the plan has something to stand on: what the film offers them, how they will find it, who pays, and what it costs to get there.

The Content Model Canvas lays out that plan on one page, in nine blocks that cover your audience, what the film offers them, how it reaches them, what it costs and how it earns. Its online tutorial takes you through the blocks in order, with questions and tips for each, so you finish with a plan you can pitch before you spend money on production.