How to Make Educational Videos for Your Company in 3 Easy Steps

Ever wondered why 4.66 billion active internet users surf the internet? Two reasons: to be entertained and to satisfy their curiosity. Interestingly, both of these reasons make the case for educational videos that teach as well as entertain.

In fact, how-to videos, part of instructional videos, are among the most popular videos (read: most viewed) type of video on the second largest search engine, YouTube.

So if you’ve been toying with the idea of creating these videos for your company (but hesitating because you don’t know how to make educational videos) we’ve got you covered.

In this guide, we’ll show you how to make education videos in three simple steps alongside the different types of videos to create.

Why educational videos?

Three reasons make educational videos such an investment-worthy B2B marketing video:

• Educational videos help position you as subject matter experts in your niche. Take the Whiteboard Friday Series, for example. The video series has not only trained thousands of SEO enthusiasts but established the creator, Rand Fishkin, as an SEO expert.
• They provide direct value to viewers as how-to videos are easy to digest, share, and go back to for reference.
• Best of all: educational videos are relatively simple to make and don’t require a bank-breaking budget. On top of that, the ROI is immense with 88% of marketers reporting positive ROI.

Different types of corporate educational videos

Convinced you need to make educational videos? Here are five use cases for educational videos:

Product demonstration or tutorial

Product demonstrations show your product in action. For instance, you can give an overview of how your software works and what it can help users achieve. Or you start your next product or feature kickoff with a lot of noise by means of a product launch video. You can also create short feature-based tutorials as well. These explain how to use a feature like Grammarly’s tutorial of their tone detector feature:

Webinar

These are educational presentations on a specific topic, featuring live or recorded video with slides, polls, live chat, and Q&A sessions to engage viewers. Need help choosing a tool for hosting webinars ? Check out this guide detailing the best webinar softwares.

Company or facility tour

These give viewers an inside look at a company or campus. The goal? To attract new hires and students or simply educate viewers as Tech Vision does:

Company stats/history

Company history videos are an engaging way to quickly walk a viewer through your company history. Alternatively, you can feature your company’s growth by showcasing your statistics in an infographic video.
Have a look how Burberry does:

Employee onboarding

This last type of education video helps new hires understand their workplace, its mission, culture, and the team they’d be working with. Employee onboarding videos include welcome and orientation videos, training sessions, strategy sessions, and more. Why not create a mini documentary out of it?

How to make educational videos in 3 simple
steps

As with creating any other video, making an arresting educational video requires a structured process so you don’t miss a vital step.

Read on to get into the details of making educational videos in three steps including the sub-steps you need to take.

Step 1: Ideation

The first step is all about understanding your audience, what you want to create for them, and identifying the perfect idea. Here’s a list of things to do:

Define your objective

Ask yourself: what sort of a video do you want to create and what are your objectives from it? Let’s say you want to make a product tutorial. A possible objective for it can be creating a short video tutorial that highlights your product’s three main features.

Understand your audience

An education video is only compelling if it answers a question your audience has. To uncover these questions, start with understanding your audience. Who are your viewers? What interests them and what are their preferences? What are some business challenges they face?

You are constantly seeking ways to effortlessly create professional videos. Look no further than PlayPlay's educational video maker - the ultimate tool for transforming your ideas into captivating visual content.

Source audience-relevant ideas

Here’s where you brainstorm potential ideas for your educational video. Three places to source ideas from are:

Your brain. The more you learn about your audience and their challenges, the better you can come up with ideas for video content that solves these challenges.

Ask your sales team. They’d have some awesome educational video ideas based on the common complaints that customers share with them. They can also come up with ideas of sales video.

Ask your audience. Whether you’re active on social, run an engaging community, or are part of communities that include your target audience, ask your target viewers what they’d like to learn. Always keep in mind that a customer testimonial video is much more authentic than your corporate claims and messages.

Once you’ve curated all possible ideas, get down to filtering the best ones.

Highlight your video’s key takeaway

Too many takeaways can confuse viewers, so they end up forgetting your message. Hence, once you finalize your video idea, brainstorm possible takeaways until you reach one key message that you want your viewers to leave with. Focus on delivering this key message right from the video’s start.

Write your video script

A video script outlines all the scenes and dialogue that go into a video in chronological order, giving you a blueprint of the entire content. A good place to start here is by figuring out the angle you want to take, followed by writing the scenes you want to include in your video.

Step 2: Production

With your idea and script ready, roll out the camera (or video template) and start creating. Here’s how:

Create your storyboard

Visualize your script in a storyboard. This is a graphical representation of each shot, showing how your video will unfold.

Select your video format

Next, decide what your video will feature. You’ve three options:

Live action that involves recording the main character in action. The Whiteboard Friday videos we talked about are live-action videos, for example.

Animation that leverages cool illustrations, animated characters, and engaging images to deliver your message. Lego does this well in their company story

Hybrid which is a mix of both live-action and animation so you can feature the best of both worlds.

Film your video

Record your live action shots. Begin with selecting your actor – this could be yourself or someone else such as a CEO sharing their welcome message in a talking head interview.

And remember to be patient. Shooting a scene takes time and practice – it’s nearly impossible to get the scene right in the first shot itself.

Choose a video creation tool

If you’re doing animated or hybrid videos, an easy-to-use video creation tool can make video creation a breeze for you.

Ideally, select a tool like PlayPlay that offers a diverse video template library to help you make educational videos quickly. You can also source high-quality stock images and videos from the DIY video tool to create engaging videos without having to film live-action scenes.

Step 3: Editing + distribution

The last step is all about polishing and shipping your educational video.

Format video for platforms

Think of all the platforms your video will go to and devices your audience will view your video on. Format according to the requirements of publishing mediums and viewing devices.

Add subtitles and music

83% of people in the US watch videos with their sound off. The same report also reveals 80% of the viewers are likely to watch the complete video if it has subtitles. The takeaway? Don’t forget to add subtitles to your video. And for those of your viewers that keep their sound on, add interesting music such as royalty-free music to keep them watching.

Jazz it up with textual motion graphics

Next, add a layer of engagement to your videos with motion design such as textual motion graphics. Here’s an inspiring example from P&G:

Edit your intro and outro and add a CTA

A strong hook in your video’s intro convinces viewers to continue watching. Equally important is how you end your video. You need to leave a lasting impression, so a tight outro will help hit your video’s objective. Feel free to check our online free outro maker on this page.

Lastly, don’t forget to add an action step (technically referred to as a call to action) that you want your viewer to take. Do you want them to try out your product for free? Or, do you want them to try out your latest bag collection? Tell them.

Share it on relevant channels

Making good educational videos is only part of the job. The rest involves sharing it on channels where your audience watches them like you're doing it with your commercial video. A video promoting checklist is handy for this last step. It could look like this:

Embed on your website or blog

Share in your Slack community

Promote it in your newsletter

Distribute it on social media

That’s it. You’re all done.

Wrapping up

Educational videos are great for establishing yourself as an expert in your niche and offering value to your audience.

Not to mention, they’re easy and budget-friendly to create, making it simple for you to experiment with different types of educational videos.

Kick things off today by selecting PlayPlay as your video creation tool. It can make a huge difference between a video well done and one that’s poorly done.