5 Tips to Create Cost-Effective Training Videos

For an increasing number of organisations, video training is becoming the best alternative for employee training today. Unlike live training, which can be very expensive, training videos give an excellent opportunity to explain concepts in a simple, cost-effective manner. They can also be delivered online anywhere, almost instantly.

In this article, we’ll talk about training videos and some expert tips on how you can create cost-effective, presenter-style training videos on your own.

What is a Training Video and What are its Benefits?

Simply put, a training video is a video-based form of content to explain a concept to someone. Whether it’s an employee training video or a video tutorial for customers, a training video is essentially used to either educate or instruct the audience on a specific topic and share knowledge or teach a particular skill.

Key benefits of creating training videos –

• Drives more traffic to your website
• Improves customer satisfaction
• Better Google search results
• Helps to take the burden off the customer support team
• Better business opportunities

Top 5 Tips to Create Cost-effective Training Videos

Here are a few tips that will help you create effective and successful training videos –

1. Set Clear Goals and Objectives

Before you begin the process of creating your training video, the first important step is to check the larger training strategy of your organisation and understand your specific business goal and what are the outcomes you are trying to achieve through your videos.

This will help you understand the overall purpose of the training video and how it relates to the larger plan. Some of the other questions that will help you clarify the complete scope of your video project are –

• Who is the training video for? Knowing and understanding your audience is the key to designing an effective training video. 
• What is the learning objective of the video? Have a clear, concise and relevant learning objective. For instance, what should employees know or be able to do after watching the video?

2. Choose the Right Video Format

It is important to choose the right format for your training video as it will significantly influence how much time and money you spend on the overall creation process. Some of the most popular formats for training videos that you can choose from are –

• Screencast: A screencast training video is simply a recording of your computer screen. These are ideal to use when you are training others on new software or computer systems.
• Presenter video:  As the name suggests, presentation videos are best to use when you record the already created slide using good presentation software. Hence, it’s easily available for your audience to watch or rewatch it multiple times post the presentation. Presenter videos are easy to create by simply recording the audio. 
• Animation: Also known as explainer videos, animated videos utilise animation software to incorporate graphics and text to get the message across.
• Micro video: Micro videos are short training videos with a focus on teaching one specific topic. Usually less than a minute in length, these videos get right to the point and are very useful for learners with a shorter attention span.
• Interactive: These training videos with various interactive elements are a fairly new format, where learners are asked to respond to different situations and questions as the video plays to engage them better with the content.

3. Plan your Training Video

Once the learning objectives and project scope are panned out, the next step is to start planning your video to build your team, understand the subject matter and gather all the equipment to get started with your training videos. Here are the things that you need to take care of –

• Depending on your overall project scope, you need to build a team. The number of people required in the team depends on the number of training videos and the final delivery timeline.
• Based on the video format type you choose, you need to find the appropriate equipment such as a good quality video camera, video animation software and more.

4. Scripting and Storyboarding

The next important task in your video creation process is to write a script. You can begin with a document in your favourite word processor and start scripting what you want to say. If you are doing a screencast or micro-video that involves screen recordings, make sure to go through the process you plan to show.

Once scripting is done, start creating a storyboard. A storyboard basically demonstrates the visual sequence of your training video through simple sketches or images.

Make sure that your storyboard won’t take too long to put together, as it will give you a better idea of your overall video length before you start with the process of recording or editing.

5. Record and Edit your Video

This one is a rather simple step, where with a little practice, you can record an excellent screencast video with the technology available. Once you’ve recorded your video, there are multiple ways to edit it and make it visually appealing for the audience. Some of these ways include-

• Annotations

In screencasts and other types of videos, annotations are an excellent way to draw audiences’ attention to particular things. You can combine text and animations with arrows and shape callouts to engage viewers.

• Animations

Here you can make text and shapes move into your video or along the screen to keep the visuals attractive and intriguing for learners.

• Text overlays

Text overlays is another technique where placing text on your video helps you keep the content visually intriguing while driving your message home simultaneously.

To Conclude

Effective and engaging training videos offer multiple advantages over live training. Apart from costing less, they can be referred again anytime and are also easy to distribute across a wide geographic area.

When creating effective training videos, you don’t have to be an expert in anything. Instead, you just need to have a very clear idea of where to start and some expert ideas, as discussed above, to leverage for your specific business use case.

Further, powerful app-based content distribution platforms such as Kytes can help you securely share all your training videos and other content in a flexible and fun way. The platform enables you to experience everything from video, audio and ebooks on one single platform for a robust training experience.