Educational Videos: Benefits, Production Plan and More

The value-driving potential of videos goes beyond entertaining your customers. When created right, used at the right stage of the sales funnel, or smartly integrated into your business processes, they are quite able to bring even more value to the table. 

In this article, I suggest revealing the benefits of making educational videos for your business and the best practices for creating them.

 

 

Educational Video Types

 

Educational video production covers several types of videos you can create for your users or employees. 

Product demonstration videos. As a rule, product demos are used for marketing and attracting investments but when created with an educational perspective in mind, they can enrich the viewers with useful information as well.
Let me suggest you have a successfully running plant and want to advance your production line with an AI-powered IoT device. Before teaching your staff how to operate it, demonstrating to them the capabilities of the technology makes a lot of sense. In this case, product demo videos can work as an introduction to the future educational process. 

 

 

How-To videos. How-to videos are the most searched types of videos on YouTube, regardless of the category. Creating them for your users is another opportunity to actually help them solve their problems, build trust, and loyalty. Your employees are also likely to appreciate detailed video instructions on how to handle a difficult task. 

 

 

 

 

eLearning videos. eLearning video production means creating a series of videos around a dedicated topic. And since videos have already firmly entered the educational industry, a lot of companies providing educational services use them at the top content their students receive. eLearning videos can also be successfully used in employee training, delivering the whole set of benefits for the business. 

 

 

Educational vs Explainer Videos

 

Some features of an educational video overlap with those of an explainer video as you have already got it. Both of the video types aim at explaining to the user a certain concept but they do it differently.

• An explainer video covers the main idea. An educational video visually shows how to realize it step by step.
• Explainer videos are mostly short (up to 1,5 minutes) while educational videos can be as long as needed to help users cope with a task.
• Explainer videos are used at the consideration stage of the sales funnel. Educational videos are more suitable for the stages of purchase and post-purchase.

 

Benefits of Step-by-Step Educational Videos

 

Teaching video production comes with a lot of value-driving benefits your current customers, employees, and prospective leads are likely to appreciate. 

 

 

• Videos explain the essence better. What’s more, they not only explain  – they show it visually so that the users have little chance of understanding something wrong and making a mistake. I’m sure you know how it works based on your personal experience  – you just have to get some kind of a complex device and try to find out how to set it up using the attached paper instruction. After wasting some time, switch to the video and enjoy the process of getting the things actually done.
• Educational videos are reusable. A step-by-step video is a type of content your employees and customers may use and get back to again and again  – at no additional cost for you!
• Creating educational videos is more affordable. Hiring an instructor or a tutor and gathering all your staff in one room to teach them something new is pricier than producing a video.

What’s more, when your employees have to spend all their working day learning, it means their everyday tasks remain unsolved. In some cases, the latter may lead to profit loss. This is also the reason why educational videos on YouTube, for instance, are good for microlearning – your team members can spend up to 10-20 minutes per day learning and get back to their work tasks.

• Educational videos promise better information retention. There are a lot of studies researching the specifics of human memory. One of them states that viewers forget 58% of processed information in 20 minutes after a traditional learning session. But since our brain processes visual information better, people are able to keep 80% of video content in mind for longer.

 

Benefits of Animation For Educational Videos

 

What are the benefits of using animated elements when creating educational videos? Below are some unobvious insights. 

• Engagement. According to the research, short educational videos with vivid animation engage even better than formal talking-head videos and online lectures.
• Creativity. Educational videos need to be fun and engaging to grab the audience’s attention. With animation, you are free to experiment with different styles and techniques – from whiteboarding (an explainer video in which a person uses an illustrated story to educate its users) to frame-by-frame one.
• Memorable storytelling. Digital stories come with great educational potential – they raise the audience’s interest, grab and retain students’ attention and are more likely to be memorized and associated with educational content itself.

 

Getting Started with Educational Video Production – Step by Step Plan

 

How to make educational videos? Educational video production steps are the same as with any kind of video content, but you still have to take some specifics into account. I will help you move on to create educational videos step by step. 

 

Pre-Production

 

1. Define Your Audience and Goals

 

There are two categories of users you can make educational videos for:

• your users;
• your employees.

Sometimes, you may target your educational videos to both groups, for example, if you plan to use a product demo as a part of the staff teaching process. Still, defining your watchers and the goals of educational video production is essential. 

The main goal of creating a video for the product users is to help them solve their tasks more effectively and build loyalty. In comparison, the goal of creating it for your staff is to update their knowledge, improve their skills, and/or teach them how to work with a new device or equipment.

 

2. Create a Video Production Brief

 

How to make an educational video brief and what is the first step when constructing a briefing? The first step is getting back to your goal and outlining the essential things and insights you would like to share in your video. You can also think about project budgeting and start searching for a training video production company at this stage.

 

3. Create a Storyboard for Your Animated Educational Video

 

Storyboarding your animated educational video is a little more challenging than briefing it. At this stage, you, with your video production partner, have to create some sketches of your future video, keeping the goal and specifics of your future video in mind.

 

4. Choose Your Animation Style

 

From now on, the creative process begins. Choosing an animation style for your educational video, compare the opportunities 2D and 3D can promise.

• 2D animation is suitable for relatively simple educational videos. For example, 2D is good for creating educational cartoons for kids, but there are a lot of 2D educational video examples created for business training.
• Using 3D animation is a good choice for creating how-to videos, especially if you need to visualize how to handle a complex system or device. That’s why 3D is often used in educational videos for MedTech, architecture, and manufacturing. It allows for showcasing the objects in three dimensions and achieving a high level of detalization.

 

Production

 

This stage has a lot of room for both creative and technical tasks. After carefully analyzing your brief and proceeding from the storyboard, the team of artists will create a full-fledged video product according to the animation style of your choice. 

 

Post Production

 

1. Editing and Voice Over

 

At the post-production stage, your video still needs some final touches to make it perfect. It is necessary to edit it a little and add a clear voiceover to complement the visual content with detailed explanations and tips.

 

2. Distribute the Video and Analyse The Results

 

Congrats, your video is ready to be shown to your customers or employees. Depending on your target watchers, consider the distribution channels you will use. If there is a video for staff onboarding and teaching, most companies share them via corporate email. You can also create a dedicated folder on the cloud server to let the employees access it anytime and get back to it to refresh their knowledge.

Educational videos for the customer are most often published on YouTube and shared on other social media. You can also consider adding it to your newsletter but don’t forget to highlight a video inside the subject line. In this case, your email is likely to get a higher open rate. Also, don’t forget to analyze the metrics and correlate them with your initial goal.

 

 

Conclusion

 

Integrating educational videos in your employee training or customer support process is a good idea since both user groups are more likely to engage with your content and better cope with a task you video dwell on. Their reusable nature also allows you to get ongoing benefits from educational videos distribution, so let’s get started with this task!

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