Consumer willingness to consume more video content, according to a study from Levels Beyond, is increasing. However, the same report showed that 75 percent of brands aren’t meeting consumer desires for video.

The true secret behind a successful marketing campaign is giving your consumers what they need. Edelman has recently released Brandshare and the study clearly highlighted that consumers seek mutual benefit from their relationships with brands. Fulfilling consumers’ needs remains the best way to engage with them.

Branded How-To Videos

Beauty brands have found a great vehicle to engage with their customers in a useful way by using branded video tutorials.

L’Oreal’s YouTube channel has a dedicated section to how-tos. Remington, the personal care manufacturer, uses the same strategy. Their YouTube channel is full of video tutorials about their hair-straighteners and razors.

Google research shows that 50 percent of beauty shoppers watch a beauty tutorial video before and after buying. Beauty brands have their content marketing sweet spot.

Why Are How-To Videos So Popular With Consumers?

Greg Jarboe, president and co-founder of SEO-PR, points to the old proverb: “Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.”

“For example, FUJIFILM SonoSite Inc., the world leader in bedside and point-of-care ultrasound, provides its prospects and customers with a wide range of ‘hands on’ and ‘e-learning’ videos,” Jarboe said. “What they’ve discovered is that these videos help to shorten the sales cycle because members of the buying committees at hospitals who haven’t met with SonoSite’s sales reps can still ‘see’ how their products can be used.”

Branded video tutorials, or how-to videos, are the best way to meet consumers’ needs and hit three key objectives of the consumer decision journey. Here’s how even :

• Be Evaluated: When consumers are evaluating your product you want to make sure you provide all the information they might need: how to use it and all the cool things they can do with the product. The traditional shopping experience is full of shop assistants willing to explain all the product characteristics for you to evaluate before purchasing. With online shopping consumers miss that experience, but brands can easily recreate it with video tutorials.
• Optimize Feedback: After purchasing your product customers seek out videos again to learn how to better use your products. Admit it. Everyone hates instruction booklets, so why not replace them with great how-to videos that will generate positive feedback for your brand? The Level Beyond study revealed that 40 percent of consumers would rather watch a video than read the same information from a branded booklet. Moreover, tutorials, how-tos and instructional videos are just the type of brand videos that 67 percent of consumers want to watch.
• Build Loyalty: Building customer loyalty improves your brand reputation. Providing your customers with useful videos about your products encourages them to visit your website or your YouTube channel. Those are the places where you can target them with new informative videos about your latest products. You could even advertise other tools that can be used in combination with the product you’re explaining.

With digital devices and media more present and a part of people’s lives than ever before, there’s nothing as good and genuinely useful as instructional content featuring human interactions to sell, explain, or describe a product. Videos are a natural solution for this concept.

Modern consumers have busy and hectic lives. Time is a precious resource that people don’t want to waste.

Who wants to spend ages reading an instructional booklet when you can watch a demo video with a friendly person/voice explaining and showing you how assemble a complicated product and how to make best use of it? Your consumers certainly don’t.

Which Brands Are Doing A Good Job?

Beauty brands aren’t the only ones providing customers with video tutorials. Complicated products such as tech devices need more explanation and some smart brands are already producing video instructions for their consumers.

Google (no surprise!) understood it first. They provide how-to and “get started” videos for all their products and services. If Google is doing it you should do it as well.

Samsung Mobile’s YouTube channel has a series of “first hands on” videos that provide the Samsung newbies with all the information they need to use their smartphones.

GoPro, the popular camera manufacturer, has a YouTube channel full of product stories, “getting started” tutorials, as well as “field guides” and a “tips and tricks” series.

Ikea doesn’t sell tech products, but assembling a wardrobe could be as hard as learning how to use a new device. On Ikea’s YouTube channel you can find many “how-to build” videos that help their customers putting together their furniture.

Developing Brand Stories

Edelman’s Brandshare study shows consumers want to be involved in the development of brand stories. It’s evident from the ever growing number of views that people love tutorials and YouTube is their natural habitat.

Consumers make their own how-to videos to share their experience and product knowledge with online communities. They fulfill a post-market touchpoint where brands commonly neglect and also encourage users to establish themselves as brand advocates.

The consumers’ involvement in branded how-to videos is an opportunity that brands are still missing. User-generated content is trusted by consumers, especially by millennials.

Smart brands should encourage their customers to produce their tutorial videos and promote the good ones. This untapped strategy would allow brands get an incredible promotion and to build trust and loyalty with a minimum investment.

Customers who publish their videos about your products are, in their own way, telling your story. No one knows your story better than you do, so it’s important to reward those who do it in the right way.

Key Takeaways: Recognize The Opportunity And Take Advantage

Including video tutorials in your video marketing strategy can only benefit your brand:

• It helps your potential customers getting all the right information about your product when they shop online and, as a consequence, it increases your customer satisfaction and grows your revenues.
• It improves you post-sales marketing strategy, providing your customers with instructions and tips about your products and it gives you the chance to advertise other products that work in combination with the ones your explaining.
• Encouraging (and rewarding) your customers to produce your branded tutorial or tips videos improves your brand reputation, and build loyalty.

Bottom line: How-to videos offer multiple benefits, no disadvantages, and require a minimum investment.