If you're planning some video training, here's a really useful checklist to get you started.
While your viewer may be required to watch the content you create, well made content will engage them more effectively, and help them remember more of what you teach.
1) Value your viewers. Give them quality content that is worth their time. They may be a captive audience, but they will repay your efforts to earn their engagement and commitment.
2) Use a structure or script. Please don’t wing it.
3) Show yourself. Communication is human. Get out in front of the camera. You are much more relatable than stock images and graphics. Be brave. Be a presenter.
4) Do more than show yourself. As relatable as you are, your messages can be amplified by well-chosen, non-distracting slides, graphics and relevant images.
5) Draw people into your journey. A training video has to be both an essay and a story. Essay structure helps people understand where you are taking them:
- You tell them what you are going to tell them.
- You tell them.
- You tell them what you have told them.
But Story is what makes them want to join you on this journey. Give them a hint of how this training will change them. How important it is. How people are depending on them to learn these things. Make the outcome a journey and they will be excited by this chance to be trained.
6) Demonstrate. Cut away to show the training in action.
7) Edit out your pauses. Even if you use a script, you will be amazed how much you can trim your gaps. Your audience will thank you – dead time really drags on screen.
8) Refine ruthlessly. At each stage of production, relentlessly filter out what isn’t essential to your desired outcome.
9) Check your lighting and sound. Your brain is amazing. It fills in for bad lighting and it edits out noises you don’t need to hear. Unfortunately, cameras and microphones pick up all that distracting stuff. So make sure your light source is in front of you. Check what it looks like on a screen, or you might not notice that the big window behind you has turned you into a silhouette. It’s the same with sound – make sure your environment is quiet and your mic is as close as possible to you. (Preferably a quality external mic.)
10) Provide support materials. Put your key points in readable form - or even interactive sheets like fill-in-the-blanks and quizzes.
And a bonus idea...
Create trailers. Get your audience ready for your style of presentation. Create intros, tasters and appetisers for them to watch before they get into the main training.
We hope you enjoy using the incredible power of video training. If we can help in any way, please get in touch. Here's an example of how we've helped others.
Setting captive audiences free
Unlocking video training’s amazing power to transform your team.
Take a look at this trailer for the training series we’ve just made with our long-term partner STC, for Crombie Lockwood.
The set-up is so simple – a STC trainer speaking to camera – but our visual design brings to life the most fundamental principle of successful selling: absolute, undistracted focus on hearing, understanding and communicating with the customer.
Everything around the video presenter has been removed. There’s no backdrop, no props, no clutter, no distraction. It’s pure communication. It says to the audience: We’re here for you. This is all about you.
As well as looking thoroughly professional, this distraction-free visual environment also becomes an immersive whiteboard for the graphics, animation and interactive elements that support and enhance the audience’s learning.
Esteem them enough to make great videos. They will engage, they will learn, they will invest their energy and effort, because you are so visibly investing in them.
Creation Films has been working with STC for around 15 years, delivering interactive engaging sales training material for many of New Zealand's top companies, including Triton Hearing, Yellow, Caci, Platinum Homes, Crombie Lockwood and more. Both the STC team, and the Creation Films team look forward to exploring with you how video can effectively enhance your team's sales training programme.
