How To Make Your Product Training Videos More Engaging

Brands spend weeks or sometimes months planning and preparing content for sales associates with the hope of it translating into increased sales. For this to happen as efficiently as possible brands seek to make their content as engaging as possible.

A failure to make content engaging is likely to result in lower sell-through as associates lose interest in, or worse yet, skip over content from your brand. This leads to uninformed sales associates who won’t appear confident to customers when speaking about your brand’s products. This is a massive issue as today's sophisticated consumers are looking for trusted guidance and can quickly pick up on staff with knowledge gaps. Worse yet, if a competing brand is producing high-quality, engaging content sales associates are likely to become brand advocates for that brand, speaking confidently and passionately about their products to consumers, while ignoring the one with unengaging content.

It’s no secret that in today’s social media-driven world short form content is king. This is perhaps most evident with the rise of Tik Tok followed by other social media sites such as Youtube and Instagram that have implemented their own short-form video content segments ‘Shorts’ and ‘Reels’ respectively in the hopes of keeping users glued to their app.

While short-form social media content is predominantly 60 seconds or less in length, research has shown that educational video content receives the highest level of engagement when its around 3 minutes in length.

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Why Are Shorter Videos Better?

While diminishing attention spans play a part in the reason why shorter videos receive more engagement than longer ones, there are additional reasons why shorter videos resonate more with sales associates.

Shorter videos make information easier to digest. When brands produce content on their products they can often fall into the trap of overloading associates with information causing them to zone out and while it’s important to include valuable information in product videos, associates can only handle so much. By shortening the length of the video it forces brands to include only the key information with regard to product features and benefits.

Furthermore, shorter videos receive more engagement as they are more likely to be viewed while on the shop floor.  Associates are predominantly focused on serving customers throughout the day and time can be sparse, especially during busy periods. Shorter videos make it quicker for associates to get the knowledge they need on the products they stock and return to the shop floor.

Finally comes the completion rate: 33% of viewers will stop watching a video after just 30 seconds, with 45% tuning out after just one minute according to AdAge.  Shorter videos are more likely to be watched in their entirety and if a sales associate does stop watching partway through, for whatever reason, a shorter video ensures they’re more likely to have watched a higher percentage of your content.

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How To Shoot Engaging Short-Form Content?

It’s easy for a brand to fall into the trap of making video content of a certain length and calling it a day, however, to make compelling short-form content there are a number of techniques that should be implemented.

Before rushing out to shoot short-form content brands should execute proper content planning in order to reap the best results. One of the key ways in which brands can do this is by scripting their videos and ensuring they specifically mention why the key features of the product are beneficial to customers rather than just listing a bunch of features.  Brands should aim to mention between 3 and 5 key points in their short videos, as this range is proven to have the best rate of knowledge retention.

Hooking your audience is perhaps one of the most important steps to getting sales associates to click on and view your content thoroughly. Before selecting a video to play, an enticing thumbnail can raise a sales associate's interest and increase the likelihood they engage in the content for longer. Brands therefore should either take a captivating thumbnail picture while shooting their content or select a freeze frame from the footage to use. The type of image itself will differ from brand to brand but action shots or shots of a product being used work best.  Another technique brands can implement to hook associates is to start the video with a short clip of the product in action. 

Finally, comes the post-production of the video itself. Brands shouldn’t rely solely on the length of the video to engage viewers as even short videos can bore viewers, instead adding eye-catching, bright pictures or graphs that are relevant to the subject matter can help keep the attention of viewers. Additionally, implementing motion graphics and colored block text is another way to keep viewers exercising their eyes. Lastly, if the video has different scenes then adding transitions can also hold sales associates' attention.

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How To Repackage Existing Content

For brands that already have a ton of existing content the obvious question is how do they repurpose that content to fit the “short form” criteria while still conveying the same message as before.

For longer content that covers numerous segments of a product, for example, a 20-minute video on a tablet that covers hardware, software, after-care and accessories chopping the long format video down into a mini-series or playlist of shorter content is a great way for brands to still convey necessary information cross but in bite-sized pieces.

This can be done either using industry-standard software such as Final Cut Pro or Adobe After Effects or using specialist software tools designed to create short-form videos such as Descript or YouTube (YouTube Shorts has a built-in feature that allows content creators to trim their existing content into short-form content).

On the other hand, brands may choose to reshoot their content entirely into ultra-short form content of 90 seconds or less, taking only the essential parts of their long-form content. Although sales associates may not get the in-depth detail contained within the longer version of the video, an ultra-short version will allow them to get the top-line points quickly if they need to refresh their memory or confirm something while serving a customer.

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Conclusion

Short-form content can transform how sales associates engage with your brand’s content. Making content easier to digest ultimately benefits brands as sales associates are more likely to engage with content they consciously or unconsciously perceive to be engaging. The more engaging your content, the higher the likelihood that they’ll pass the product knowledge you convey to them to customers in a confident and knowledgeable manner.

For brands that have struggled with creating engaging content in the past, there are simple measures they can implement to make their content more appealing from improving the thumbnail to adding brighter images and motion graphics.

Myagi’s digital retail sales enablement platform allows brands to share their content directly with sales associates globally at a click. Additionally, Myagi also provides real-time engagement data so brands can track how well their content is being received down to an individual store level. We also provide retail sales associates with the opportunity to give brands feedback on the content they are consuming, helping brands deliver exactly what the sales associate needs to build product knowledge and confidence. Sometimes brands need help in order to get their product training content up and running.  Thankfully, Myagi Services can help and offer a range of solutions: from content creation and lesson planning, to editing, translations, platform assistance and more.

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To find out more about how Myagi or Myagi Services can help with your content, get in touch or click the green circle to chat with us.

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