Online tutorials are a great way to diversify your brand audience and grow awareness of your small business. With your help, your audience can learn about topics they care about anytime, anywhere.
It’s a great opportunity to add another string to your bow and create additional revenue. You could increase your authority in the market and position your business as an expert in your industry, potentially driving improvements in consumer confidence. This guide will help you learn how to plan, produce, and market online tutorials for your small business.
The benefits of creating online videos
There are several benefits to creating online videos for your company. Not only does video content allow you to target a whole new audience, but they also provide an opportunity to boost potential revenue. Some of the additional benefits include:
Creating passive income – your business can reap financial rewards from creating and releasing online tutorials. It could become a great source of passive income, as your business will be financially benefiting from the tutorial long after it’s posted. Use Square Checkout to add buy buttons to your online site to allow customers to easily purchase your tutorials.
Attracting new audiences– by diversifying your offering, your business can attract a range of new customers.
Increasing exposure – having online tutorials will expand your reach to customers around the world. Effective marketing will help to raise awareness of your business in the market.
Honing your skills – an online tutorial is a great way to perfect your skills and showcase them to potential customers. Demonstrating your expertise can go a long way to reflecting the quality of your business offering.
Appearing approachable – online videos can help your brand to appear approachable. This can increase consumer confidence and engagement.
How to choose a theme
It can be hard to narrow down your creative ideas, especially when brainstorming for a brand-new branch of your business.
Start with a calendar – use a calendar to plan when and how often you’d like to post videos. This is a great way to get started with content ideas too – could you plan videos that correlate to national holidays, like Mother’s Day? Use Square Appointments to plan meetings and post tutorial upload times.
Brainstorm with your team – organise a time to get together and bounce ideas around. It’ll be helpful to discuss with members from different levels and departments to get a wide range of suggestions.
Consider your areas of expertise – ask your team to consider which areas of your business they feel most comfortable in, and what they would be prepared to talk about in an online tutorial. For example, if you work in accounting, you may feel that a video about income tax would be helpful to potential customers.
Identify customer queries – think about the questions your customers are asking. Perhaps you’re a computer supply shop and your customers need help connecting their printers to the web? A tutorial on setting up your new printer could be a handy resource. Or, if you own a bar, cocktail making tips could be an engaging tutorial to keep customers talking about your brand.
How to design your class structure
It’s important to ensure your videos are as exciting as possible to keep your audience engaged. This is particularly vital in the saturated digital market, where many companies are competing in the same space. Follow these steps to create an effective structure for your online videos:
Define your audience – it’s important to identify your audience. Understand them inside and out and understand what they need from your content to ensure that your tutorial is relevant.
Research competition – it’s helpful to establish your main competitors to identify a unique purpose for your tutorial. Observe what your competitors are doing well or what could be improved and implement this in your own video.
Create a storyboard – when creating your video content, it’s wise to start with a storyboard of sequences. This will help to map out your video and plan what elements you want to include, and in which order.
Get the rest of the team involved – show the rest of the team your content and ask for feedback on your ideas so far. Brainstorm ways you could improve your tutorial.
Don’t get disheartened– if your first idea doesn’t work out, try a different angle or experiment with new ideas.
How to market your tutorials
Now you’ve done the leg work and created an engaging online tutorial or course of tutorials, it’s time to market your new offering.
Marketing your tutorial is a vital part of helping people to find your offering. Consider using these marketing techniques to spread the word about your video:
Integrate social media – social media is a great tool to increase exposure of your tutorials. If advertising your videos on your website, use tools like Square Online to link up your social media channels so you can promote videos to your followers. Create social media advertisements that can be shared across platforms, raising awareness of your new offering. Consider promoting on LinkedIn to capitalise on the platform’s pre-engaged audience.
Run promotional offers – implement promotions on your content and courses. Why not offer the fifth lesson free or have flash sales on signups to online tutorials?
Inhouse billboards – advertise your online tutorials to your team through billboards, posters, and flyers. This will help to inform, as well as excite, your employees about the videos.
Inform eager customers – don’t forget to advertise your tutorials in your store or business and tell all your customers about it. If you hear a customer struggling with an aspect of your service or product that you have a tutorial for, use it as an opportunity to push your new offering.
Take the plunge and branch out to create online tutorials for your small business and use Square to unlock your business potential. From recipe instructions and tax advice to technology guidance, the options are endless.
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