Transcript

It’s safe to say, work has looked a little different over the past year. Maybe not quite like that... but we’ve certainly seen businesses come up with some creative fixes to problems caused by COVID.

So other than video chat, how can video be a solution for some of the ways COVID has disrupted your business?

For a lot of brands, communicating with and educating their customers, clients and employees is a pretty significant component of their business. Perhaps it’s in-person support for customers. Or in-person training for employees. Either way, these processes have likely been disrupted by COVID.

For organizations in this position, a transition to educational or informative video content can not only help today –in the age of COVID –but it can also have a long shelf life that can free up time and resources for you in the future. But more on that in a minute.

If your brand relies on educating in one way or another, which it almost certainly does, there’s a range of videos that can help you out. Training videos, FAQ videos, How-To videos, etc. The foremost job of these videos is to educate. But to do this well, they still need to engage your viewer.

Think about your favourite teachers and your least favourite teachers. What separated them? I bet your favourite teachers took a genuine interest in helping you grow as a person. They knew how to engage you with the material and had clear ways of explaining new or difficult concepts. Or maybe they just made class fun. What kind of teacher does your brand need to be?

The answer to that begins with having a solid understanding of your audience. Who is going to be watching these videos and what do they need to know? As always, knowing who you’re speaking to is the first step to understanding the direction that you need to take your content.

So let’s look at an example of a business that would normally provide in-person customer support. Your customer’s success is dependent on your ability to educate and inform them on how to get the most from your product or service.  

With in-person support no longer an option, a library of training videos can be a powerful solution for encouraging your customers to self learn. To do this successfully, a well thought out lesson plan is essential along with ensuring that every video or topic follows a format that:

A. Is clear and concise so that the person watching it can follow along without confusion.

B. Addresses any area where common mistakes are made so that the viewer can double check these spots.

C. And that it’s easy to follow along with things like chapter markers and titles so the viewer can pause, repeat sections, and scrub to the areas that matter most to them.

The main point being that these videos need to be extremely functional with the goal of getting your customers up and going on their own without the assistance of in-person support. A library of training videos is equally as effective for internal use with employee training.

So what about retail and other businesses that would normally rely on in-person interactions for sales? This has been an interesting area to watch as more businesses, big and small, have turned to ecommerce as a solution. This transition is already challenging enough without considering how to make up for the missing benefits of normal face-to-face interactions. But there are some ways videos can help.

Product videos are the best way to give your customers that in-person buying experience. They can provide much needed context and should blend informative content with just a bit of promotional content.

FAQ or Frequently Asked Question videos are a great way of addressing, you got it, frequently asked questions. By creating FAQ videos, you can inject a bit of that in-person experience into your website while ensuring you customers get the information they need.

And while these videos need to be informative, they don’t need to be boring. Ideally they provide an opportunity to not only inform your customers, but to also build positive associations with your brand.

Video content can be a great tool right now and for however long COVID continues to interrupt your workflows. And as with any investment, it’s worth thinking about how this content can free up time and resources for you in the future -even when COVID is a thing of the past.

Back to the training videos. Can this content replace or reduce the need to travel to all of your customer’s locations? Even if not, can it be a part of the support materials that you offer to your clients as an additional resource?

Or what about that transition to ecommerce? Realistically it’s a change that’s here to stay, so consider how video content can strengthen this new approach and ensure its success for the long haul.

At the end of the day, every brand or organization is going to have a different scenario and will need to adapt to the challenges of COVID in its own way. But as we navigate possible solutions to these problems, we’ve seen video being turned to time and again -and often in ways that some businesses have been turning to for years. So we think it’s worth asking, if video can help in this moment, how else can it continue to help well into the future?

If COVID has caused problems or broken important processes for your business? Reach out, we’d be happy to explore some of the ways video can help.

‍