Educate & Encourage – Using Instructional Videos To Support Your Customers
One sunny Colorado afternoon, I was swearing up a storm in my sewing studio. The culprit? A clothing piece I was working on. To be exact, the shoulders in the shirt I was sewing turned out too narrow, even though the shirt fit perfectly everywhere else.
Did I give up? No!
Not the ice cream I had that day, but one I have fond memories of!
Ok… I gave up for a little bit to take an ice cream break. The truth is that lots of problems have been solved with an ice cream break. #Facts
Refreshed and back to the problem in my studio, I realized I needed to find an expert to teach me a wide shoulder adjustment. That day (and on many others) YouTube saved the literal shirt on my back by finding an excellent video that explained the process clearly. I was on my way to a better-fitting shirt in no time.
Ahhhh, the power of instructional videos!
Instructional (or informational) videos are the content that so many customers and prospects are looking for and crave from brands.
In fact, instructional content that’s under five minutes long “had two times the engagement of promotional content of the same length.” (Source) Promotional content here refers to ads or brand videos.
In this world of short attention spans, why wouldn’t you want to hold your audiences’ attention for longer, if you could? Using videos strategically can give your business or organization a serious advantage.
Starting from the beginning though — what exactly is covered in the category of educational videos? And how do you figure out where your instructional content gaps are?
I won’t leave you hanging. Let’s get into it!
What falls under the instructional video category?
These videos can include any of the following:
Photo credit: Junior Ferreira on Unsplash
Explainers
Tutorials
How-to’s
Support content
Walkthroughs or demos (e.g. how to use certain products or services)
Webinars
Courses
These types of videos are a popular way to share knowledge or information in an in-depth way. Their goal is to be helpful to your audience, not to sell (although sales may come from these videos directly or indirectly).
One note before moving on: you’ll notice I use “instructional,” “informational,” and “educational” interchangeably throughout this post. In this context, they hold a similar-enough meaning so I feel okay with it.
Why should you make informational videos?
Just like any content, these videos require effort, time, and resources to make. However, the stats above show that informational videos are some of the best videos you can make for your customers or prospective customers.
You likely already spend a lot of time, effort, and resources seeking to do or doing the things that educational videos can help with, such as:
Photo credit: Dave Lowe on Unsplash
Garnering the trust of your visitors
Gaining credibility as an expert in your field
Solving your customer’s problems before they have to reach out to your customer support team
Standing out from your competitors by being helpful
Being accessible to a wide rang e of people (including those for whom reading a FAQ page or emailing a customer service rep is difficult or time-consuming)
Enjoying word of mouth marketing that comes when people share your videos with others having similar issues, which may result in conversions and sales
Retaining valued customers by showing them new ways of using your product or service, or providing them with tips and tricks that’ll extend your products’ or services’ usefulness
Answering questions or concerns that’ll help move your prospects along towards conversion or sale
Instructional videos are an ideal way to check off these tasks simultaneously.
Videos don’t have to be short to be impactful
Length of time makes a difference, but maybe not in the way you think!
Now that you know why you should make instructional videos, let me address a misconception I’ve seen floating around a lot lately. It’s this idea of short videos being the best for your business. Period. No nuance, no nothing!
Channeling the spirit of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, I dissent! Of course, short-form videos have their place and I use them for clients regularly, too. However, the same study cited above showed that engagement rates for videos did not change drastically when the video was between one and five minutes in length.
So yeah, short videos aren’t the only ones worth making. And often when you’re working on instructional videos, there’s no way to really explain a process or give enough background in less than 30 seconds.
I’m here to say that that is okay!
As long as you’re being strategic and thoughtful about your instructional video, viewers will appreciate the level of support you provide in these videos.
How do you identify content gaps for instructional videos?
Just as important as creating instructional videos is making sure you make the right instructional videos. And you’ll need some help to do that – here are a few ideas of where to go to figure out your video content gaps:
Website analytics
Photo credit: Sam on Unsplash
If you have access to it, take a look at your website analytics for more information on:
What pages are getting a lot of traffic (besides the homepage)?
What pages in your FAQ or help section are seeing lots of engagement and activity?
Where are people bouncing off your site the most and quickly? That might indicate that they’re not finding the information they need while they’re there.
Basically, you’re looking for where customers or prospects are going to look for answers and what kinds of answers they’re looking for.
Website sleuthing, here we come!
Customer service team
Ask the people who interact with your customers regularly what questions they are hearing. Or perhaps there is a system that aggregates this data already for your company.
Alternatively, you might search for your company name and “sucks” or some other negative term to see where customers are facing struggles, but not contacting customer service.
Reddit is another place to mine for feedback or pain points that even your customer service reps might not have heard. Just be sure to steel yourself before you dive into the complaints section of the internet! It won’t be pretty.
Sales team
Check to see if there are areas of confusion for prospects. Your sales team or anyone directly helping customers through the sales process or onboarding may have insights for you here.
If you’re a solopreneur, Your sales team might be you or it might be a team of hundreds if you’re a large company. That’s okay — every size company can benefit from thinking through what’s causing confusion for their customers and creating informational videos that’ll help ease that confusion.
Valued customers
Check back in with valued customers to see what areas of confusion they had with your product or service. Or what they might have wanted to know when they first started using your product or service, but had to learn through trial and error instead. Sometimes they might have created hacks that you’ve never considered, which is veritable gold for a video!
Informational videos don’t just have to be videos that share knowledge from the company to the customer, but can also be customer-to-customer.
Not all of these areas will make sense for your business or brand, but hopefully these suggestions spark some ideas for where to start looking for video content gaps. Once compiled, you can prioritize the video content to be created based on your business goals and strategy. Then, if you need help putting your ideas into motion, find a digital video editor or reach out to me. Going forward, don’t forget to look back at your videos to plan for future helpful video content. Also, as your product or service changes, make sure to adjust your video content to communicate the new information.
Note: I highly recommend reading the Wistia State of Video Report referred to throughout this post (I’m referencing the 2024 version, but they release it every year).
It can seem daunting at first to create instructional or educational videos, but you got this! You’re an expert and you have everything you need to get started.
