The Ultimate Guide to Creating Effective Instructional Videos

When you need a piece of information, an in-depth review, technical product demo, and product comparison before making a final buying decision—you look for instructional videos.

Regardless of the niche, your customers and audience need to learn things as the technology is changing fast. Studies show that people prefer to consult instructional videos when looking for answers.

You can check the facts below:

• 83% of people watch instructional videos when looking for informational content and technical aspects of products.
• People make final buying decisions after watching in-depth and technical review-based videos.
• 2 out of 3 employees show better performance and can finish their tasks faster if provided with instructional videos.
• More than 70% of audience go-to video hosting platforms such as YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok to acquire help with their problems.

How to make instructional videos?

Initially, it seems challenging, but in reality, it is easier to kick-start. The read to this blog will help you get easy hacks and tips to make quality-oriented instructional and training videos.

What is an instructional video?

An instructional video offers a detailed, step-by-step review, explainer videos on some technical aspects, and shows how to use certain product features.

Instructional video making can be tricky to promote if they are too long, tedious, and unclear about what message they are delivering. The more accessible part of instructional video making is that they are budget-oriented, as instructional videos are not expensive as other video types are.

Some common types of instructional videos

Micro-videos—a short form of video that covers a single topic on some product instructions.
Tutorial videos—as the name tells all, tutorial videos are also known for product demo videos. These videos focus on step-by-step instructions on the features and functions of the products.
Training videos—are created to train both employees and users. For employees, they can be new skill learning videos. For users, these videos focus on training users on some technical aspects of products.
Explainer videos—explain the business message, products’ functions, and features.
Recording lectures, debates, or live sessions—lectures are also based on instructional videos because they speak on the business image, future aims, and technical aspects of products’ features.
Screencasts—are short informal videos that are screen recordings to share information on specific tasks.

How to begin with making of Instructional videos?

We all know video content strategy before kick-starting the design and development of instructional video content.

Make a well-thought-out plan, and decide on tools and marketing platforms before kick-starting the video-making process.

Step 1: The buyers of your products are essential—know their needs well before jumping to the video-making process.

For all the obvious reasons, you need to address all pain points, desires, and offering solutions to all problems of your target audience—is the crux of the instructional video-making process.

Churn surveys and user feedback process might have told you clearly about your customers’ real problems and how you can offer them solutions.

Moreover, smart metrics and analytics help you pinpoint users’ interests in your products.

Having this information, you now know what topics, problems, and solutions you have to discuss in the instructional and training videos.

Begin with the basics needs, problems, and solutions to grab the interest of your users.

Later you can make videos on the solutions that are high-demands of your customers. Remember: the more complex the problem is, make it simpler when offering its solutions. Otherwise, your audience will lose track of attention and divert away to other videos that provide simple solutions.

Step 2: Jot down all points that cover the entire video

Once you know how to address the needs of your audience—it’s time to create a storyboard and script writing process.

It’s one of the essential parts of the video because the success of your video relies on the quality of the script you write for your video.

Quality of script doesn’t mean adding fancy words and using high-profile scenarios. Quality of script means organizing all the points well, addressing all the issues while keeping it short, to the point, and capable of maintaining the audience’s interest level.

Some people use doodles, draw pictures, and add animations to make an exciting storyboard. You can use these sketches later in the video as well. You can show your users the planning process by adding a screenshot of storyboards.

A pro tip: Create a remarkable symmetry between storyboard and script. Even the most simple script can do an excellent job.

The narration must be well-matched with what is happening on the screen.

Few important tips for writing an excellent script:

Avoid Jargon: Using simple language is advised. It should be as simple as you are explaining things to a kid.
Show and tell: Take things step by step by showing them on-screen and explaining them.
Thoroughly review the script before finalizing: Read your script out loud before recording it. Even you take mock trials to record your script and listen to how it sounds in the video.
Get feedback from your teams: Taking feedback seems a bit scary, but it helps significantly improve the quality of the script. The feedback may help you to highlight the points you may have forgotten to add.

Step 3: Adding Voice to the script

Voice technology has taken everyone by a great surprise with the quality of service it offers at the most budget-friendly rates. The quality of the script enhances by the quality of the voice you add to your videos. It should sound confident and influential.

You can acquire the service of voice-generating tools to record your videos. They come at significantly cheaper rates and offer 99% quality audio with the most human-like voice. It will take a few minutes to do a voice-over of your videos through voice-generating software.

WebsiteVoice is an enterprise’s choice software because of its excellent audio-generating services. It gives you multiple options to pick the voice and accent of your choice. The clear, coherent, and most human-like voice can take the quality of your videos to the next level.

Adding your voice or hiring voice actors can become a time-consuming phenomenon if you have to record many videos in a short period. It may require endless editing to remove the background noises and to remove the part with unclear speech.

Step 4: Record your video

You have several options for recording the instructional video. You may want to record your screen, or you may want to record it with a camera, depending on the topic and situation of the video.

The screen recording process is more straightforward, requiring minimum editing, fewer video-making tools and software, camera angles, and a light and video recording studio. You can practice the smooth cursor motions. Conduct a few practices on what you want to show your audience.

Recording video with a camera

Recording instructional video with a camera is similar to recording any video.

Depending on your choice and video quality, you may need a good camera, a well-lit and soundproof studio, and other video recording and editing software.

A few essential tips for recording video with video-making tools

• Don’t get overwhelmed with fancy pieces of equipment. You can use a smartphone and ordinary video recording tools.
• Using a high-profile studio is not a necessity. You can use a quiet room with good light.
• If you are unsure about using different camera angles, try using the angle showing the objects clearly.

Step 5: Kick-start the video editing process.

Editing is the second most important part after preparing storyboards and scripts.

The quality of the video editing process will determine the overall quality of the video.

People use professional video editing tools to make the video look nice. But it’s not necessary to use expensive video editing tools.

Some of the good-quality cameras offer video editing facilities.

What should you be editing in your video?

• Improve the voice quality. Some of the voice-enhancing software is available primarily in standard video software.
• Improve the overall image quality of the video. Again, your video editing software would help you improve the overall quality of the video.
• Add graphics and animations to your videos if necessary.
• Add the relevant music to make the video more engaging.
• Add relevant captions to your videos.
• Add subtitles to your video. They play a vital role in enhancing the video’s understandability, accessibility, and outreach.

A pro tip: We all know the importance of subtitles to make videos easily understandable for people suffering from hearing disabilities. Subtitles play a central role in making videos accessible world widely. Instead of, hiring a third party or adding subtitles manually is not advisable today—witnessing the rapid change and high demands of users desiring fast results. SubtitleBee is one of the best-performing tools in the market. It’s known for standing upright to its challenge of 99% accuracy of captions and subtitles, not in one language but 120 different languages. You can try out free trials and decide for yourself.

It’s a wrap-up:

With rapid change transforming the ways of doing business—it has become essential to start investing in generating quality content if we want to see our businesses doing their best in the upcoming future.

Seeing the persistent demands for generating instructional and training content has become unavoidable. The good news is video content making is becoming seamless and faster with the help of wonderful video editing software. What’s your excuse for not getting into video content marketing strategy?