Short and sweet, video Video Q&A and How-To offer seriously powerful return on investment for time spent.
Most VQA-HT content is structured with a question, short answer, and long answer components. Clips are usually under 3 minutes each and often grouped into topical playlists.
Define the audience for your services or products and the stages of the buying cycle. Most clients know this but have not documented it. The sales cycle is also often known but not documented.
Since VQA-HTs need to be easy to produce, a simple VQA-HT template is required. This should be mildly branded, but have consistent elements that can be adjusted, tagged and linked as each question is published. Consistency from question to question is critical. Save individual production assets in well organized format (e.g. entrance, exit, call-to-action, logos, overlays, closed caption templates.)
Many clients begin writing VQA-HT as if the customer is already theirs. The reality is that a mix of questions and answers is needed – divided roughly into the questions people ask about your product and services (customer support), and those they ask as they begin the cycle of research without a company in mind.
This process harvests the questions being asked on the web about your services, products and business category. Variations on the same question are collapsed into groups. Internal FAQs are built from internal sales team and customer support activities. These questions are placed into a sortable shared database for team collaboration.
This stage requires that you assess your staff’s readiness and ability to narrate the videos on-camera. While each answer is short, producing 10-12 at a time can require some stamina on the part of the production team and narrator. This is also the time to identify the location for your VQA-HTs and the setup you’ll use to capture them. Production resources should be assessed and decision made about in-house versus outsourcing.
After choosing the set of questions to be answered, assignments for writing the answers and video production are determined. Length of answer (2 minutes is a good max) needs to be reflected in each script. Using the VQA-HT templates, raw video is turned into short video assets. Meta data is created to go with the video assets and is used for planning publication as well.
I recommend that VQA-HT be shot in bulk, capturing as many as possible per session. Sometime the narrator will bring a couple of change of clothes to offer visual variety to the recordings.
The VQA-HTs are produced and stored in industry-standard format. Closed caption files are created for each clip as well as appropriate metadata. They are stored in an asset library as pairs until time to publish. A video distribution service might be used to simplify the process as each VFAQ is distributed. Playlists may be created to group related VQA-HTs together. VQA-HTs may be posted as blog or social media posts as well as stored in video galleries on the business website.
As VQA-HTs are developed it’s important to measure their impact, and to use customer behavior to guide expansion where they show it’s needed. Analytics reports specifically for VQA-HTs will be built into your dashboard to show use and engagement.