How To Use Tutorial Videos To Explain “What You Do”

One of the best things you can do in video that you can’t do in text, or even audio, is explain things. You know, like a tutorial. Guy Kawasaki has a great article about tutorials here.

This week I sat through eight hours of companies pitching themselves to a panel of experts at SXSW. It was a challenging experience because the companies had two minutes to explain what they do, and very few could. Indeed, in most cases the first question that the panelists asked was, “What exactly do you do again?” The same thing happens hundreds of thousands of times every day as people visit company websites. How many websites pass this simple test: “People can understand what the company does in two minutes or less”?

One of the video tutorials he talks about is this one below.

Here’s another tutorial video below that talks about the credit crisis.

You should watch for two reasons. 1. Because it’s a good video that explains how the USA got into this financial mess, and 2. Because it shows an effective way to explain something in visual form.

Of course, Lee over at CommonCraft.com is the master of these types of videos as well. Here’s a video on investing in what they call “plain English”.

These types of tutorial videos are an extremely effective way of getting your point across about a complex issue. Try it.

I should point out that making these types of videos is not easy. Many of them require effects that need to be done by a professional video editor or animator. It’s not going to be cheap to get this done. Contact me if you need a resource.