Creating Product Tutorials for Your Small Business

One of the best ways to promote customer satisfaction and engagement is to create video or written product tutorials highlighting your small business’ products.

By showing or explaining how to use your products effectively, you can reduce frustration among customers who’ve just received (or are setting up) your product, while also providing reassurance for prospects who are considering a purchase but may be unsure about making the commitment.

Product tutorials are a form of educational marketing that help your audience understand how to use a product or to get answers to basic questions, while also building awareness of your company online. They can also help reduce customer questions by offering a self-service format for product support.

Tutorials can be created in a variety of formats, such as articles, videos, infographics and webinars. Regardless of the format, the common purpose of a product tutorial is to demonstrate its features and to explain their value.

Product tutorials tend to fall within three broad categories:

• Demonstrations where you show your product being used
• Explainers where you go into more detail to explain how the product works
• Step-by-step instructions to help a first-time user get started.

A product explainer video, for instance, can help answer the following questions for someone in the discovery or evaluation phases of their product search:

• What problems does this product solve?
• How does this product make my job or life easier?
• How easy is this product to use?
• Does it look safe?
• Will this product help me save time or money?

Video Tutorials

Depending on your product and how comfortable you or a team member might be on camera, these videos can be animated or can feature someone doing an explanation in front of a whiteboard. You can use software to create your animations, or you can outsource the production for a relatively modest investment.

Whichever format you choose, your tutorial video should be short. Try to keep your demonstration video to about a minute to 90 seconds, while explainer videos can be two minutes or shorter. If you need more time, it’s better to break a video into segments than to post something longer.

You should finish the video with a call to action and contact information for your small business. This provides a way for someone who has more questions, or is interested in making a purchase, a convenient way to reach you without searching.

You should also post a transcript of your product tutorial video to help increase the search engine optimization of your content. Adding a transcript offers another way for search engines, and customers, to find your tutorial.

Choosing a Topic

A good way to identify product topics for your product tutorials is to imagine you are a potential customer and conduct searches of existing tutorials. This will give you ideas about what to say, and, hopefully, ways to say it more effectively.

Be sure to check online reviews of your products to identify common questions or potential frustrations posted by previous customers. You should also ask your team members about the types of questions they get from prospects or customers.

It’s also helpful to keep the production relatively simple, such as shooting your video on a phone with a plain background. This helps your product stand out with a minimum of distraction.