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Discover the best places where you can put your video tutorials to work.
Think of your videos as 24/7 employees: Each video works hard for you, 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
So, what are the best places to put your videos and software tutorials for maximum lead generation and conversions?
Grab a coffee and watch the video below – or keep reading.
Here’s a quick overview – feel free to jump to what interests you most, but don’t miss out on the “Your Software & SaaS” part!
Let’s start with the obvious one:
Right at the top of your homepage – above the fold – start with a hero video or explainer video.
In a very short timeframe of 60 to 90 seconds, this video gives an overview, creates a connection, and shows the main benefits:
The perfect addition to a hero video are customer video testimonials.
You can go as far as placing them right above the fold (as Groove does in a quite ingenious mixture of hero and testimonial video), or place them at the bottom of your homepage:
The next – maybe not that obvious place – is your knowledge base or help center. The place where you offer all your support material.
Instead of only offering written, long-form support articles, why not put extra articles for your videos, like “main walkthrough” or onboarding videos in a certain section of your knowledge base?
Finally, there’s your blog.
Enrich your blog posts by placing a video up front, with a short introduction like:
“Grab a coffee, lean back, and watch the video. Or just continue reading.”
That’s one of my favorites: Integrate your software tutorials directly into your software, directly into your app.
Remember that onboarding video I’m always talking about?
Let’s have a look what happens if a new trial user logs in for the very first time into the CRM tool Deals & Projects:
This is an interesting way of combining a warm welcome (setting the stage and creating an emotional connection) with educational parts, giving the first-time user a quick tour of “what is where” in your software tool.
But don’t stop there.
More complicated parts of your software like settings deserve their own show video tutorials.
Put links to your videos directly into the relevant screens of your tool.
Or display thumbnails of these tutorial videos to make people click:
Creating video tutorials and onboarding videos helps you kill two birds with one stone:
People want to achieve things quickly. They want quick wins.
In fact, people prefer helping themselves over calling a support hotline.
So, if you offer self-help in the form of video links and thumbnails directly where they need it, people will get where they want quicker.
They will have a good impression of your software and not get annoyed about not being able to accomplish something.
By creating these in-app videos, you’ll be taking a huge load off the shoulders of your support team.
Just think of all the questions and support tickets that will not pop up in your chat and email anymore, because people are watching your videos and helping themselves!
Now we’ve checked out your own channels. Channels that you control: your homepage, your knowledge base, your own software & saas.
But of course, videos can work hard for you in the public.
First of all, on YouTube.
If nothing speaks against it, publish your video tutorials on YouTube.
I’ve put together a complete online course on how to create and publish video tutorials for maximum effect. The starter course is free, so go check it out!
In the course, I will teach you how to optimize your videos and how to do video SEO for your tutorials so that they’ll show up when people are googling on YouTube.
Let’s look at this example for someone searching for “how to use iPad as teleprompter”:
Publishing your educational videos on YouTube is ideal for the awareness stage of the buyers’ journey.
And by creating video tutorials that are optimized for SEO on YouTube, they will almost inevitably start showing up on Google!
By optimizing the heck out of your videos, you can not only show up in the first search results of YouTube but also on the first page of Google itself.
Google loves delivering rich, visual content to its users searching for answers.
Videos are a great opportunity:
It’s even easier to show up on page number one of Google with your video than to achieve that with 2000, 3000, or even 10,000-word blog posts.
If you want to dig deeper, check out SearchEngineWatch’s great article “How videos generate quick SEO results”.
So, that’s the YouTube part.
Finally, you can use your videos on social media.
This will need some tweaking, though.
The general recommendations are to capture the interest of your viewers within the first 15 seconds, and to really subtitles into the videos.
Usually, your videos will play without sound when they appear in a Facebook or LinkedIn timeline:
That’s where the subtitles come in handy: People can follow along reading the video captions and then click the video to turn on the sound.
Don’t underestimate the power of social media!
Even for “boring” topics like software tutorials.
If you make them right, if you put in the groundwork, and you create great video tutorials that help your customers get where they want, then you can publish them on social media.
Look at your buyer persona, and if your target customers are hanging out on LinkedIn, then publish your videos natively on LinkedIn.
These are the four main channels where you can put your videos to work hard for you.
Before creating a video tutorial, choose which channel – or even better channels (in plural) – you want to address, and then optimize your video for it.
A good starting point is to create the main tutorial, and then slightly altered (e.g. shortened) versions for all of these channels, including call-to-actions at the end.
What have you been publishing your videos? Please share with us in the comments!
