Maksym Babych, serial entrepreneur and SaaS professional.Founder and CEO SpdLoad
Saas product expert, Maksym Babych notes that the main objective of the video tutorials is to educate your customer. Your client should know more about your software or service, understand what it is able to do and how it works.
However, it doesn’t mean that the tutorials are only about your product/service, its features and your company.
Let’s be honest, your potential customers don’t care about your particular product or service. They don’t aim at having your solution with all those features you are offering.
They want to know how to make their life and job easier and more efficient. They want to understand how your product is going to solve the problems they face and achieve the goals they have. It may sound too straightforward, but it’s true — all of us care for ourselves first.
Let me give you a real-life example, actually from last week. It’s a different industry but proves the point perfectly.
Last week, I got brackets. Yes, I’m not 15 anymore, but I finally decided to do it. Why?
I was walking by a dental clinic. I couldn’t help but stop and watch the video they were showing in their clinic windows.
It was nothing else than a video tutorial (or explainer video) targeted at potential customers.
So what on earth made me stop and get brackets after years of indecision?
- The video wasn’t about brackets (i.e. the product).
- The video wasn’t showing how the brackets worked (i.e. the features).
In short, the video didn’t put brackets front and center. Instead, there was one simple message:
Get that powerful smile.
That’s how the video began. That’s how the video ended. And that’s the message that was repeated throughout the video.
There were some technical details mixed in (i.e. the educational part of the tutorial video), but the main message was „Get that powerful smile“.
This dental clinic had struck a chord. I went in. With my trained marketer’s eyes, I discovered posters, brochures, all with that same powerful message.
When I finally signed my treatment plan, I couldn’t help but laugh (in more than one way) when reading the name of the dental clinic for the first time:
Smile.
Yes, the dental clinic’s name is „Smile“. They just nailed it.
They did everything right. They knew it’s not about their product or service. They understood it’s only about their customers and what results they can achieve for themselves or what pain they can take away.
Or would anyone face the hassle of wearing brackets for years, having problems eating, looking weird, without having that great end result in mind? That powerful smile?
What your potential customers care about, in fact, are only the results. Is your product or service able to help them achieve their results?
Believe me, if they can do it without your help, they will. Why do they need to suffer all this hassle of migrating and implementing your software, if they can just live without it?
Always remember that whatever you are doing, whether it’s in marketing, sales or support, should be about your client. It is never about your product or company.
I know that you understand it, but I’m sure you cannot fully realize it. And I also know that your product is a treasure you are proud of, love and care about as much as it is actually possible. You are ready to do everything to make the world use it and love it.
But from your potential client’s perspective, it is something that doesn’t work for themselves yet.
How to make them understand that your product is worth paying for? Think about them and their background. What are their needs, problems and goals? Speaking marketing language, you should know your “buyer persona” or “avatar”.
In case you have an example of “buyer persona” for your product already, use it as a draft. If you don’t, I recommend you to create it as sooner as possible. You can use a Neil Patel’s guide on “How to Create and Reinforce Your Buyer Personas” to ease the process.
Video Tutorials as a tool to describe the benefits your product brings
What we aimed at is to create a video tutorial a potential client will watch from the beginning to the very end. Our goal is to show the benefits and features of the product, as well as to build trust and connection with the client.
If we don’t understand the particular value the product brings, boring details will deter us. Thus, the tutorial should start with description of impressive results your product can help to achieve.
Only after the benefits are described, you can tell about the feature your product has. Try to repeat (as many times as possible) the information about the benefits and values for the potential customer throughout the entire tutorial.
