Shooting How-To Videos For Social Media Marketers

The “how-to” video is the quintessential video for content marketing. By creating a video that solves a problem around a particular keyword set you not only show yourself off as a thinker but you create extra inbound marketing bait.

How To Write A How To Video

Choose Your Topic

This is probably the most important part of the process. Have you identified a solution to a problem that you’ve haven’t found online yet? Are you looking to get some traffic around a particular set of keywords? Take some time and research YouTube for videos about topics that are important to your audience. Look at the competition and see if there are some gaps they haven’t covered yet. You may discover that you have the opportunity to build an entire channel that didn’t exist before. If you’re SEO savvy, do some keyword research using your favorite tool and see which terms are the most searched in your area. If there are 200 searches a day for “make organic dog food” and you do just that, you may have found your topic.

Choose A Catchy Title

Good Ol’ Fashioned copywriting rules apply here when you’re choosing a title. You want it to be mind-tingling and SEO friendly so that both your audience and Google love it. Consider using the Cracked.com formula of headline writing – “Number Adjective Noun That Noun Verb”. Really. It’s a successful formula. You can also use “How To” in your title. If someone sees that they’re going to believe they’re going to learn something.

Introduction

Keep this simple and straightforward. Introduce yourself, who you’re with and then tell us what you’re going to do. Shoot this as a separate segment so that you can get it right. Afterward, you’ll be able to edit it in to your clip.

List of Supplies

If you’re doing something complex, you’ll often have a list of supplies that your viewer will need to gather. Remember that people consume content differently, so rather than only taking shots of each item for your video, consider itemizing the list in your blog post.

Storyboarding

When you’re designing the video, it helps to break out your story into its component parts.

Video: Obviously, video is best for conveying action and dialogue. Which shots do you want to use for this video?

Images/Graphics: Which images convey your message. Will you be using photos or are you better served with drawings that you can cut in.

Text: Which pieces of text can you use? This will probably come in the form of titling or may be even itemized lists in your video.

Audio: You want to be heard. You’ll need a voice. You’ll may also need music and sound effects. Consider where they may go in your clip.

Shooting The Steps

You have a couple of options here for shooting your how-to video.

Shoot all at once: Shoot your entire video at once so that you get a nice continuous piece of audio and video to use in your timeline. Audio is a critical piece of the video since you’ll use it to structure the story. Various shots can be added as needed if you have a solid structure.

Shoot in segments:Record each step of your “how-to” video individually. Doing it this way insures that each piece is polished as possible. Plus it keeps you in the flow of each segment giving you confidence each time you repeat yourself.

B-Roll

In order to keep things lively, you’ll need b-roll. That is you’ll, need individual shots of either your materials or separate closer, detailed shots of you working on something. You’ll add these shots into your timeline to give your audience something to look at besides just a long speech on fixing washing machines.