How to Create a Series of Knowledge Videos

When you hear the phrase “knowledge videos” it probably takes you back to your school days, trying to cram in a series of videos to help you study for your finals…

There’s a reason why this type of learning works better than reading text books – we actually process visuals 60,000x faster than text, making video the perfect learning tool.

But as a marketer, have you ever considered creating knowledge videos for your audience? It really could be your secret sales weapon…

Why knowledge videos?

One of the biggest reasons to create a series of knowledge videos is because it will set you apart as a leader in your space. This type of video is all about improving people’s lives, and educating them about them about how your product can help solve their problems, which in turn will move them along your sales cycle.

And people really do like the learn, so long as it’s something that is of interest to them. You create a video series that’s tied to your niche, and you’ll not only connect to your audience, but they’ll keep coming back for more. So let’s look at how to create a knowledge series…

1. Finding your topic

Coming up with ideas for your knowledge videos can be difficult to master. Sure, you can go with what you think would be of interest, but if you really want to pull in a large viewer base then you need to be a little bit more strategic than that. First, I’d recommend doing a bit of keyword research to give you a great starting point.

For example, if I check out suggested keywords in Adwords, it’ll give me a listing of various results. I can then use this data as the basis for a knowledge video series – as our audience will be using these keywords to search in Google, it’ll give us a better chance of ranking for it if we’ve created content relating to these keywords.

But don’t just stop there. What about the questions that your audience is seeking answers to? If you take a look at popular forums such as Quora, you’ll be able to search for questions that surround your niche. So in this instance, I’ve searched for “video marketing” and it’s given me a list of popular searches that people want answers to:

By using this information, we can create knowledge videos that we know our audience will want to watch. The key to creating great video content is to highlight the struggles that your audience faces, and use that content to offer the solution.

2. Creating the script

Now that you’ve got your topics finalized, you can start to create your scripts. Even if you want to create a fairly relaxed webinar style video, it’s still important to have a script to guide you through the film and ensure that nothing goes wrong. When you’re writing your script, think about how you want to communicate with your viewers.

If you’re teaching them about a certain subject, you’ll want to keep it relaxed, informative and well-paced. Map out your script like you would a blog post. Split up your video into sections to keep it engaging, consider using props to help tell a visual story. And remember to include a takeaway for each lesson learned to reinforce your key points.

For example, in the video below you’ll see Nicola explain how to use video to reduce your support queries. To help keep the viewer engaged, we break up each scene with title screens so the viewer can pause if they wish. We’ve also overlaid a screen recorded section (1.01 secs) to help the viewer visualize what Nicola is talking about.

Another great example of a brand that produces knowledge videos is Moz. They produce a series called “Whiteboard Friday” in which Rand Fishkin discusses various different SEO-themed topics each week. Each video is around 10 minutes long and Rand presents in front of a whiteboard, helping the viewer to visualize what he is talking about.

3. Putting together the production

So you’ve crafted an awesome script and it’s time to put together the production? Great – now it’s time to think about video equipment.

If you want to set your brand apart as a leader, then you need to make sure that you are creating quality videos.

You’ll need to consider investing in:

• Camera
• Lighting
• Tripod
• Teleprompter (if you feel you need it)
• Black screen

If you don’t have a huge budget, then you can consider using your smartphone and hooking it up to a tripod to film. Once you’ve finished filming, you’ll need to edit the footage to make sure it’s slick enough to publish. We edit our videos in Adobe, but there are plenty of video editing software tools available.

4. Promoting your series

The last and final step is to promote your series. Don’t overlook this one, as it’s very important.

Other than posting about it on social media and paying for ads, there are a few tricks that you can do to pull in the numbers. Of course, generating thousands of views isn’t something that happens overnight (unless you’re really lucky) so you need to continuously put effort in to see the results you’d like.

First, you need to be thinking about optimizing the landing page so that it’s set up for the best search results. For our knowledge videos, we create a blog post and include the keyword of the video in the URL, meta description, and page heading.

I’d also recommend writing a short summary about the video content, or even include the transcript like Moz do on their channels, plus add social sharing buttons so that viewers can promote your video content further.

Next, be sure to email your customer database about your video series as this is an audience that’ll be interested in watching. For example, we sent out this email directing people to our video about ‘How to create an explainer video script’.

After you’ve maxed out your own channels for promotion, it’s time to request the help from other sources. This is something that the industry likes to call ‘Outreach’ and it’s a great way to leverage people who have a larger audience than you. There are plenty of bloggers and influencers within your niche who’ll be willing to help promote the content for you – it’s all a question of finding them.

Check out BuzzSumo as this is an awesome tool to help you search for influencers within your area of expertise. You can then approach them to see if they’ll either share your knowledge videos across their own channels, or would be willing to accept a guest post from you so that you can link back to your content from their site.

Takeaway

So those are my top tips on how to get started on creating a series of knowledge videos. Creating knowledge videos really can help provide the insights that your audience needs to buy your product or service, so it’s certainly worth including it within your marketing strategy. Don’t forget to keep the content relevant to solving their problems, and you’ll soon build a community of followers through your videos – good luck.