How to make “How To” videos

How to videos are a great way to make things easier for your customers. We all know that. However it is actually a great way to help yourself with marketing as well as your own team. Now it is a bit hard to create a video explaining this, so pardon us for using text in this case.

Read on why to find out why you should still continue using text, however how much you can improve and where by adding video as well.

How to question?

There are questions you should ask yourself when you are about to create some how to videos. Depending on the type of the how to video you one or more of them might apply.

How does this video help someone?
How does your service helps make someone's life easier?
What question does the How To video answer?
Who is the How To video aimed for?
Why your clients or customers want to use your service?

The amazing thing about these questions is that they help you know more about how your video should be designed. So let us check it out with an example.

A1: This video should help someone get introduced to our service
A2: Our service makes it easy to add video to their system with almost no codding
A3: The video showcases how to sign up and where to find the info they need to start using our service
A4: For all our new customers or people testing our system
A5: Because we have award winning white labeled service that makes handling media a quite an easy thing to do.

Now with these 5 answers I know, and you can know immediately what you need to do to make the perfect How To video. We need to make it simple and expect people that watch it not to be familiar with our service nor our features. It should only showcase the info needed to start so it should not be long. It should also showcase why they should pick our service, such as showing that we are award winning service (hint).

If you try to answer those same questions yourself you will quickly see how easy it is to get the fundamentals of your videos.

Now, as we mentioned, there are different types of How To videos, so one type will be OK for your customer while a bit different would be needed for your support team or your sales team. Continue further to find out more about these different types.

Types of How To videos

"How to explains you how to do something what kind of types could there be". True, yet knowing what type can mean a very different video produced. This also goes well for the text that goes to your pages. This is also the difference that you find out if you are making your own videos or if you hire a company that does this for you.

These are the most notable types:

Instruction type of How To video
Tutorial type of How To video
Training How To video
Presentation How To video
Introduction type of How to video

Now let us give you a bit more details about each.

Instructional How To video

All How To videos are in a way instructional as they give us the instructions. With that said, the instructional How To video is in its nature short.

These videos are great if you want to describe a specific feature or section of your system. For example in e-commerce you could create a simple instructional video on how to add a video to the basket or to favorites. You could make another video on how to checkout from the basket.

These videos could then be offered on product page and on the basket page, each allowing your customer to quickly see anything that might not be obvious for them at first.

Of course these videos are great for your team as well. They can be like little notes on how to use some button, or some page and alike.

So think of these videos as something short that you can place in different places and help your customers or your team with specifics.

Tutorial How To videos

Now tutorials are just like instructions yet so much different. They are long and combined instructions. Using e-commerce as example, the tutorial would be how to go from store to the email that shows what you purchased. It would guide you on adding the product and then go to checkout, payment options as well as explaining that the email was sent with ordered items and additional details.

So these types of videos are great when they are long. They cover more segments or pages and might even require some specific actions to be made to follow along. This is generally the case with tutorial.

Tutorials however should have a clear path or story-line that they follow. Highlighting the trouble areas and breezing through the simple or not as interesting parts.

Tutorials can be made for your customers as we mentioned above, however also for people with similar interest - like game tutorials, or your team if you want to provide them with tutorial on how to do something. When it comes to your own teams however there is a different type of video How To that you might be looking into instead.

Training How To videos

With your own team you might not want to share the same information as you might with customer, or the other way around. Usually if you were making a tutorial for your team you would want to include more details. After all what most of your customers might find boring your team has to know.

You will also want to include specific details like when some issues could happen, or how to intentionally do something in order to help your team know more.

This is why the training videos are not great for sharing with your customers as they can seem mostly boring or make them try and use the scenarios that were not intended to be done.

The most important thing with the training videos is to make sure they are not too long. It is always better to break them up in smaller sections than to keep a very long video. After all once it goes part 15 minutes of video with high amount of detail it is hard to know what will stay and what will be forgotten.

Presentation How To videos

Some How To videos are not really intended to be directly followed. A good example of this are How To videos created for one or more presentations.

For example imagine being on a stage and doing something. If it is live many things can happen:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IW7Rqwwth84

If you are giving presentation, having people watching your every move and you feeling like you are put on a spot and under headlights the last thing you need is the ups moment. This is why How To video is sometimes prepared in advance.

This allows you to have a video that plays back. Up to you if you will be pausing it as you go, or if it is going to be a video that plays in back as you talk.

Regardless of how you will run your presentation, it might just make it easier for you to avoid the mistakes that could otherwise happen.

This will now take us to the last type of How To video that you might want to create.

Introduction How To video

As you have seen above these How To videos are bringing your service or product closer to your target audience, regardless if it is within your team or your customer. The introduction type is specific in the way that it is designed to be more attractive than helpful.

For example imagine the tutorial type of How To video. It gives you the steps and details. Now same content created as introduction video would be faster, maybe with music, or maybe not. The sole goal would not be around how to accomplish something, rather to showcase that it is easy and possible to do this with your service or product.

Above there are examples for services, however as same applies to product this example will be about a product instead. Imagine a Frisbee - the plastic "plate" that is thrown around in the air. If your goal is to sell one, the tutorial about how to place your hands and throw it to fly long might not be as interesting. Having few scenes of just kids throwing it around and laughing on the other hand would be great.

So the goal of the introduction type of How To videos is to make your service or product easy to see in use by someone that might not have been in contact with it before.

Closing it all up

So how does knowing the type helps us? Good question, and to answer it let us remember the questions from the start. Here they are:

How does this video help someone?
How does your service helps make someone's life easier?
What question does the How To video answer?
Who is the How To video aimed for?
Why your clients or customers want to use your service?

You can see it as if there is a 6th question about what type of How To video you want to create. If you need to help your customers to be introduced to your service like we said in example above then we know immediately to keep it interesting, light and short.

It should be about how easy, simple or fun it is to use our service or product.

Likewise if we wanted to help our customers solve the commonly asked question, the goal would be to create tutorial video. This means that you should plan to include more details and all the steps that might be needed before and after the same.

We hope that this helps you with your own How To videos and please do feel free to reach out if you have any questions for us about the same. As always, if you need any help, reach out to our friendly support team at support@ziggeo.com.