How Audience Research Impacted Our Ideas

From our questionnaire results we were able to get information on how we could make our ideas for our horror trailer better. To get a wider range of results and to make our results more reliable we used 3 different ways to collect results two of these involving different media platforms such as SurveyMonkey and Emailing friends. As we didn't want to be bias against a certain sex we tried to get an even amount of boys and girls to answer our questionnaire. We were able to get 28 males and 23 females and although it isn't exactly 50% we still had a good amount of different sex applicants. We tried to ask certain questions to help shape our trailer better for our target audience.  14 people said they liked horror films in general and 31 then went on to say that they would go and watch a psychological horror film. This means that the general public would go and watch our film (if it was being made) and we are not taking huge risks as people would go and watch our movie and we can see this from our results. We were able to understand more about our applicants as we asked what age they were, from this we can clearly see that most of them were between the ages of 17-24 with 28 applicants, 11 0-16 year old's and only 5 over 25's. This allows us to get an in site to larger audience and what age groups like different things, its also clear that our target audience is going to be between the ages of 17-24 as this will give us a larger reach. We asked the very important questions of how our applicants heard about new upcoming films and what social networking sites they use. These 2 questions would allow us to not only understand more about our audience but to also think of a marketing plan (if needed). The 3 main ways of people hearing about the films were through friends, online (reviews, blogs etc) and adverts for the film. This didn't surprise us and if anything just backed up what we already knew however we still felt the question needed to be asked so we had the facts to back us up. We had a mixed response with the social networking sites question of course Facebook and Twitter being the highest, however other less known/used sites like Myspace were still in our results, this shows us that even though a certain media platform or a certain social networking site isn't used very much there are still people and still an audience using them, informing us that if we did need to advertise our film we should advertise even on the less used sites such as Myspace and Bebo. Of course the main question of our questionnaire was do you like horror films? This allows us to see if we are heading in the right direction with our narrative and whether it will be a success. 34 out of the 51 applicants said that they do like horror films and these are the people that we would be targeting as 1: our movie genre is horror and 2: they're the larger minority of people. This would of course help to increases sales. Our questionnaire allowed us to gain knowledge on our target audience and to build the preferences for our target audience. Without this information we feel that our trailer wouldn't be used to its full potential and so wouldn't be as big of a success as we would want it to be.