How to Make Teaching Videos That Stick

Video has long been thought of as a tool for external communications at a company. Many people associate video with driving sales. Others assume business videos are television ads, requests for donations, or silly social media entertainment. In reality, however, video is an incredibly effective tool for internal communication within your organization — especially for team training.

Video is no longer just a futuristic, once-in-a-while teaching tool when it comes to educating employees at enterprises or small businesses. In fact, studies show that at least 74% of organizational teachers or trainers regularly utilize video to teach employees new skills and knowledge. Using video in your company training process simply makes sense.

Studies show that using video as a means of delivering information helps improve engagement and increases the chances that employees both enjoy the training and feel captivated by the process. Videos have also been shown to boost retention, helping ensure the lessons you deliver to viewers actually stick with them once they turn off their screens.

Related Reading: Ready to supercharge your corporate training videos? Check our our corporate training video production guide blog post.

So, videos increase memory — but how can you be sure the content of your videos really resonates with your team members? In this article we outline a few tips for making teaching videos that really stick with the people who watch them. Creating memorable teaching videos will allow you to optimize your training process and help ensure that you're building the strongest team possible. Download our free e-book Video for Training, Learning and Development to help jumpstart your employees to their success.

Use Your Personality

One way to be certain your teaching videos are forgettable is to make them boring. To avoid this, focus on infusing your personality into the video. When you are recording the video, use a friendly, engaging voice; speak colloquially and don't use stilted language; and be warm and engaging. People connect to you when they can sense your personality, but if you seem dull, bland, and like a blank slate, they will have a hard time connecting to your message — and a hard time remembering it.

Keep It Short

Even if you have a lot of material to deliver, make sure each individual watching session or video is short enough for learners to consume, digest, and remember. Learners get overwhelmed when they're given too much information, and it becomes impossible for them to remember it all. How do you make teaching videos that stick? Isolate individual lessons in each video, keep them succinct, and break up the learning process. Shorter lessons are stickier.

Tell Stories

Don't just deliver facts or explain processes in your teaching videos. The best training videos use a narrative structure, and they tell a story. To devise a gripping story to weave into your lesson, choose a hero that will be the focus, then describe obstacles they are facing, and finally show how they will overcome those obstacles. Be deliberate about giving your story a distinct beginning, middle, and end.

Telling stories doesn't just make lessons more fun. It actually keeps people engaged, because listeners/learners want to satisfy their curiosity — they will listen to the lesson from start to finish because they want to know how the story ends. Also, story structures aren't only effective because they can harness the power of suspense. They're also a familiar, comprehensible format — and one most adults have gotten used to hearing and making sense of since infancy. So, when you deliver important information that needs to be learned in a story framework, people can immediately grip on and understand without having to do a lot of extra work — which increases the chances they'll internalize the content and be able to recall it, long after the video is over.

How Viostream Can Help You Make Great Teaching Videos

Research has proven that video is an incredibly powerful training tool. So, making teaching videos is a great way to ensure you're delivering all the necessary lessons to your employees. If you want to know how to make teaching videos that linger with learners long after they've left the screen, consider using Viostream as a tool.

Viostream has many features that allow you to customize lessons and infuse elements that make them memorable, which can greatly improve your training and team educational process. To get a better understanding of how Viostream can help you make teaching videos, browse the Product page. Our leading online video platform allows for branded video galleries and offers a central place for video storage and access, so your team members can watch and learn from the videos, no matter whether they're working in the office or are remote, across the globe.

Start your free trial today and explore your video possibilities.