One-third of internet users have watched a tutorial video this week. If ever there was a stat that tells you why you need video tutorials, this is it.
At Viddoyze, we know first-hand just how important a tutorial can be. We’ve helped tons of businesses harness the power of tutorial videos with our software.
Now, we want to do the same for you.
So, let’s get into it. By the end of this article, you’ll know how to use a video tutorial to retain and upsell existing customers, attract new customers, and improve your brand’s presence within your niche.
What Is A Video Tutorial?
A video tutorial is a video that teaches viewers something new about a product or service. For most businesses, this means creating content to help existing customers use its products more effectively.
Roughly speaking, video tutorials are used for existing customers (90%), while some (10%) are created for lead generation. They mostly begin with the phrase “how to…” and can also be known as how-to videos or educational videos.
Differences Between Video Tutorials And Explainer Videos
Tutorials differ from explainer videos in one fundamental way: while a tutorial video teaches a skill, an explainer simplifies a concept – usually “why” a potential customer needs your product or “how” precisely something specific operates.
A tutorial is used at the bottom of the marketing funnel (BoFu); it convinces people to buy or solidifies a relationship with an existing customer. Conversely, explainers persuade people to learn more about your brand (ToFu, or top-of-the-funnel content).
Differences Between Video Tutorials And Instructional Videos
These two types of content are very similar, but there is a slight difference in how they are deployed:
- Tutorials explain one specific task in detail
- Instructional videos provide a broader guide on a topic
As mentioned above, tutorial videos are BoFu content, while instructional videos are ToFu content.
Differences Between Video Tutorials And Training Videos
Tutorial videos are for customers and prospects, while training videos are for your staff.
You’ve seen a hundred training videos. They cover company culture, legal issues, health and safety, problem-solving, and business-specific issues, such as “how to use Sales Force” or “how to process a customer’s order.”
Benefits Of Video Tutorials For Businesses
- Retain Customers For Longer
- Reduce Pressure On Your Customer Service Department
- Promote Your Product Features And USPs To Sales Prospects
- Improve Your Brand Prestige And Business Reputation For Customer Care
Retain Customers For Longer
When a customer has a problem, they want a solution fast. A tutorial – ideally, one they can find online – is the perfect way to give your customers the answers they need.
Invest in making several helpful tutorial videos, and you’ll keep your existing customers happy without clogging up your customer care comms or support ticket backlog.
Moreover, you can use these tutorial videos to actively remarket your existing customers through email and social media platforms.
After all, the key to increasing the lifetime value of your customers is to keep them using your product. Regularly emailing your customers with helpful tutorials that teach them something new about your product gives them new reasons to continue paying for it.
Reduce Pressure On Your Customer Service Department
We touched on this briefly in the point above. A tutorial is a great way to free up your customer service team.
By making tutorial videos to host on your website (on customer help and FAQ pages), you can help disgruntled customers solve the problem themselves.
Even if a customer does contact the customer service team, one of your tutorial videos will have the answer. All your customer service team has to do is direct them to the right tutorial video.
Promote Your Product Features And USPs To Sales Prospects
We’ve touched on how creating video tutorials is essential to retaining your existing customers. Yet, what many businesses don’t know is that they can also win new customers with the same video content.
Promoting video tutorials that cover your product’s exclusive features is a great way to make your competitor’s customers consider switching to your brand.
The key to this strategy is understanding your competitor’s product, its limitations, and potential pain points for customers, then creating tutorials that let shoppers in your niche know they need not worry about these issues if they purchase your product.
Because the video is a tutorial, it’s a much more subtle selling approach to some of the other videos in your content marketing strategy. Mixing up the messaging of your marketing is a good thing; it enables you to appeal to a broader range of people.
Improve Your Brand Prestige And Business Reputation For Customer Care
Generating brand loyalty from your customers is easier than you may think. You only need to provide them with a product and service that matches their expectations.
Video tutorials are one way to meet your customer’s expectations. Things will inevitably go wrong with your product, and customers accept that. What your customers will not accept is spending their time calling customer service numbers, explaining their problem, and being left on hold.
Many customers prefer to solve their problems themselves. Watching a quick video providing actionable advice on solving their problem is many people’s optimal customer care solution.
Put simply, providing enough useful video content for your customers will keep them happy. The happier they are, the more likely they will sing your praises via social media, review sites, and with friends and family.
Types Of Video Tutorials
Animated Tutorials
An animated video tutorial uses motion graphics, dynamic art, and visuals to explain a particular task or topic to a user.
Animated marketing videos offer many benefits: they’re faster to make, often cheaper, and can be used by businesses across various industries and subjects.
Animations are perfect for explaining abstract products, such as software or educational courses, because they aren’t bound by physical limitations. If you need to explain something complicated, animations allow you to provide visual aids to help watchers grasp your ideas.
However, animations are not so suitable for fashion, and other visual products, where the consumer needs to see the physical product.
Live-Action Tutorials
A live-action tutorial video uses actors, physical props, and real locations to show customers how a product works.
The major benefit of creating tutorials with live-action is the use of actors. People relate to real people, and a good tutorial video makes you more likely to form a connection between the viewer and your brand.
Unlike animated tutorials, live-action tutorial videos work best for physical products, such as cars, electrical goods, sports equipment, and homeware.
Screencasts
A screencast tutorial is a video recording of your computer screen, showing watchers how to do what they want to know.
The screen recording usually accompanies an audio narration that provides step-by-step instructions.
Screen capturing is almost exclusively used for software products, where a detailed explanation is usually needed. A screencast allows you to show viewers exactly how something works, so there’s less chance of a misunderstanding.
You can capture this using a screen recording tool, such as Screencast-O-Matic, with a webcam recording tool and a good microphone – high-quality audio is vital for this type of video tutorial.
How To Use Tutorial Videos In Your Marketing Strategy
- Dominate Organic Searches For Your Brand And Product Keywords
- Keep Your Social Media Accounts Active With Regular Video Content
- Use Paid Ads To Enable Your Tutorials To Reach A Larger Audience
- Make Your Brand Presence Felt In Your Customers’ Inbox
- Host Live Webinars And Answer Customer Questions In Real Time
- Upsell Your Existing Customers To Premium Products Or Services
Dominate Organic Searches For Your Brand And Product Keywords
It’s no secret that video is great for SEO. 91% of businesses found that video helped increase web traffic, according to Wyzowl.
Just like every webpage on your site, videos allow you to rank for keywords in YouTube and Google Search. To search engine algorithms, your website and YouTube profile are the most authoritative and trustworthy sources about your brand.
Why is this so important? Well, the minute you start to make a name for yourself, there’s a real chance other businesses will begin to bid on your product name keywords to highjack your web traffic.
Sneaky, we know. But in reality, it’s a common tactic in business. The only way to stop this is to create a bank of high-quality video and written content for your site.
By creating videos covering every possible keyword people use to search for your products online, search engines will recognize that you’re the authority on this topic and rank you ahead of any competing website.
There are tons of things you can do to help your website video marketing but here are three essential tips before you upload your content to YouTube:
- Include your primary keyword in your video’s title
- Include your primary and secondary keywords in the video description
- Create relevant YouTube tags based on your primary keyword (between 2 and 5)
For more detailed advice on how to get your videos to the top of YouTube search and Google Videos, read Viddyoze’s expert guide on video SEO.
Keep Your Social Media Accounts Active With Regular Video Content
Whether it’s Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram, video tends to outperform other types of social media content regarding shares, organic reach, and engagement.
So, to maximize the ROI of your social media efforts, you need to prioritize posting video content across each channel.
Tutorial videos are a great way to market your products to new customers and educate existing customers about the many valuable ways they can use them. By sharing this content, you’re also more likely to steal buyers away from the competition – just be sure to point out every unique selling point (USP) your product has.
The big question here is, how often should you post? Social experts Sprout Social suggest 11 times per day across all platforms, which is too much for most smaller businesses. We recommend posting at least one video daily (you can repurpose the same video for each forum) alongside other non-video posts.
Use Paid Ads To Enable Your Tutorials To Reach A Larger Audience
Essentially, paid ads guarantee that more people outside your followers and existing customers see your content. Just like video SEO, there’s so much you can do with online video advertising, but to keep things simple, we’re going to stick to two key points:
- Use lookalike audiences: one of the best ways to find new leads, lookalike audiences allow you to clone your existing customer’s data (demographics, interests, behaviors, purchasing patterns, etc.) and find similar people based on that information. This way, your ads will land in front of consumers more likely to buy your product, broadening your target audience. Here’s a step-by-step guide for how to do this for Facebook.
- Boost a tutorial video that did well organically: using your analytics platform (Google, Facebook, and YouTube all have detailed analytic dashboards), you can see which tutorial videos performed the best the first time you posted them. Look for videos that did well for completion rate, reach, average watch time, and click-through rate. Pick a few videos people enjoyed, and then boost them using paid advertising to get the content in front of more people.
Make Your Brand Presence Felt In Your Customers’ Inbox
Whether it’s an instructional video, a tutorial video, or any other kind of video, this type of content can supercharge your email marketing.
Just mentioning “video” in an email’s subject line can improve open rates. Considering email marketing is worth billions, it’s well worth the effort.
Regular communication is vital to a successful video email marketing strategy. Remind your customers about your product and how it can be used with video. You could send a new video each week, educating your customers about your products.
Not only does this keep people engaged, but it encourages customer engagement, which is excellent for improving revenues. Remember, retaining a customer is much cheaper than acquiring a new one – long-term customers tend to be easier to convert and upsell, too.
Host Live Webinars And Answer Customer Questions In Real Time
Do you keep getting the same questions sent to your customer care team, even though you have a how-to video dealing with the issue?
If so, it might be time to create a live webinar instructional video to deal with the issue once and for all.
Hosting a webinar is a great way to show your customers that you are willing to go the extra mile as a brand, building relationships. Here are a few more tips to help you make a tutorial video webinar that gets the best results:
- Almost a third of consumers signed up for a webinar to learn something about a hobby or passion, according to HubSpot
- Thursday is the best day to host your webinar, according to MegaMeeting
- Hour-long webinars generally attract more attendees than 30-minute webinars, according to WorkCast
Live webinars also allow you to ask your customers questions, share tips, and get new ideas for future tutorials.
Upsell Your Existing Customers To Premium Products Or Services
As we’ve already touched on with social media, email, and webinars, keeping your existing customers sweet is very important.
Existing customers are 14x more likely to purchase than new customers. Making tutorial videos for your premium product’s features is a great way to upsell your existing customers.
Let’s look at the car company Audi as an example. Audi sells one of its cars to a customer. It’s mid-range, with tons of great features, but it could be more top-of-the-line. Over the customer’s lifespan, Audi sends out videos highlighting the features of its next-level cars, gently soft-selling an upgrade somewhere down the line.
The above example is very specific and long-term (the average person buys a new car every six years). Still, the customer upsell nurturing methodology can be applied to any industry.
Tips To Find New Content Ideas For Your Video Tutorials
- Ask Your Customers Directly With A Survey
- Listen To Your Company Service Calls
- Use Google Autosuggest
Recommended reading: 36 Fresh Marketing Video Ideas For Your Business
First and foremost, you should make a tutorial video for every feature your product has. Not only will this pre-empt any customer complaints, but as we’ve discussed, these how-to videos can be used in a wide range of marketing strategies.
Once you’ve got a core set of videos, you can use the following ideas to create tutorial videos.
Ask Your Customers Directly With A Survey
Once you’ve built up a base of existing customers, ask them what kind of content they’d like to see with a survey. You can run this through email or social media. Alternatively, you can use something like Survey Monkey.
Listen To Your Company Service Calls
Don’t want to ask directly? Listen to Customer Service calls to see what common complaints or problems crop up. If you don’t have time, ask your service team to flag regular complaints. Next, make a tutorial video to deal with each problem.
Use Google Autosuggest
Use Google’s autosuggest feature in Google Search to get an idea of the questions people are asking in your niche. We recommend starting with your brand and products before moving on to more general problems. Here’s an example we ran for Viddyoze:
Tutorial Video Examples
- How To: Draw Face | Easy Beginner Proportion Tutorial
- Intelycare Safety Training
- How To Use The SEO Dashboard | SEO On Wix
Recommended reading: Recent Video Marketing Examples (And The Goal Behind Them)
How To: Draw Face | Easy Beginner Proportion Tutorial
This in-depth tutorial walks the viewer through the task (drawing a face) in simple steps. Notice the first scene introduces us to the host before switching to the demonstration, making the connection between the viewer and the teacher. It’s a great example of a live-action tutorial at play.
Intelycare Safety Training
Health and safety videos are one of those necessary evils in life. They can be dull, but their message is important. This engaging animation is an entertaining take on the niche, delivering essential information in a fast-paced, dynamic way.
How To Use The SEO Dashboard | SEO On Wix
What we love about this one is the attention to detail. A near-perfect example of a screen recording, this tutorial walks the viewer through Wix’s SEO dashboard in easy-to-follow steps. By having the host appear in the bottom corner, the video is humanized (which consumers always love to see), while the use of chapters shows thought and care for the customer.
How To Create A Video Tutorial
Making video tutorials can be daunting. Time and money are incredibly valuable for small businesses, and anything that takes up much of either is a huge deal. And rightly so.
That’s where Viddyoze comes in. We know how valuable your time is because we’ve been there – we were a small business once, too.
Our tutorial video maker is designed to help you create high-quality content in just minutes. Creating tutorial videos with Viddyoze is easy.
Start creating tutorial videos for your business right now FOR FREE.
For a limited time only Viddyoze is offering a 7-day free trial. Access our video creation software, create an unlimited amount of videos, and if you cancel before the trial ends, you won’t be charged a penny.
Redeem your free trial by following this link. This is your chance to grow your business with video marketing, totally risk-free.
Common Tutorial Video Mistakes
- Choosing The Wrong Video Format For Your Product
- Creating Tutorials For The Wrong Target Audience
- Not Tracking Engagement Or Video Performance Metrics
- Including Too Much Filler Content
Choosing The Wrong Video Format For Your Product
Don’t choose a live-action format if you’re selling software. Likewise, don’t make a tutorial about a physical product, like a car or a guitar, with animation.
Take the time to think about what your product is and which type of tutorial would provide the best viewing experience for your audience.
Creating Tutorials For The Wrong Target Audience
Keep things focused on your existing customers. That means nothing overly promotional – these videos are supposed to be educational. On that same note, keep things simple and easy to understand to avoid alienating viewers.
Not Tracking Engagement Or Video Performance Metrics
Track your video performance using analytics; this helps create better content, as you’ll learn what your audience likes and doesn’t like. Most social media platforms have a built-in analytics dashboard.
Including Too Much Filler Content
People are watching your video tutorial because they have a problem, so get to the point. Tutorials aren’t the place for comedy or hard-sell tactics. If the viewer doesn’t think your video can give them what they need, they’ll be gone in seconds and could become frustrated with your brand.
Final Thoughts On Video Tutorials
The next step is to start creating content that works for your audience. From winning new customers to engaging existing ones, now you know just how valuable tutorial content can be for a business. Start your journey with Viddyoze, and take your marketing efforts to the next level.
Redeem your 7-day free trial now.
FAQs
What is the meaning of tutorial video?
A tutorial explains how a product’s features work.
What is the purpose of tutorials?
Tutorials educate customers about the USPs of a product or service.
What happens during a tutorial?
Whether you’re a content creator making YouTube videos or a hardware store owner creating DIY videos, tutorials follow the same pattern. You tell the viewer about a product’s features, explaining how they can get the most out of it.
What is the difference between a tutorial and a course?
A tutorial is a short video related to a product or service, whereas online courses are products in themselves, teaching the viewer a s
kill. For example, “How to become a video editor” or “How to learn to code.”
How long should a tutorial video be?
A video tutorial should be as long as it needs to be. The length of a tutorial depends on the subject and the level of information required. You can make any video the perfect length with good video editing software.
