How to Boost your Brand Training with Video

“Your brand is the single most important investment you can make in your business.” –Steve Forbes

Your brand identity is a key aspect of your business, and brand training can drastically affect your company’s reputation, your customers’ loyalty, and your bottom line. Every employee needs to embody brand values: an Ipsos & Medallia study found that 64% of respondents have avoided a brand because of a poor experience, and 47% have avoided a brand because they heard about someone else’s bad experience. But don’t lose hope: good interactions can have ripple effects, too, and 77% of respondents say they’ve chosen a product or service because of a good experience with the brand.

For employees to embody the brand, they have to understand it. This is especially important in industries, like retail, with lots of customer-facing roles. Unfortunately, only 42% of retail employees say they know what their company stands for and what makes their brand different from competitors.

Why Video Works for Brand Training

While there are numerous eLearning strategies for communicating a brand to employees and shaping on-brand behaviors, some new training methods – namely, video training – have shown to be more effective at shaping behaviors.

Cognitive Effectiveness

Corporate training that utilizes video takes advantage of the picture superiority effect: a phenomenon in which pictures and words together are easier to understand and remember than words or pictures alone. Studies show that when learners have access to words alone and are asked to review what they learned three days later, they will remember only 10% of the information. However, if learners are presented with words and images together, they can recall up to 65% of the information three days later.

Video is a great way to combine images, audio, and text. As an immersive form of training, video makes use of the cognitive quirk that helps learners remember pictures and words. Essentially, video learning is just more salient than text-only learning styles.

Easy Implementation

Video is also a good choice for brand training because it’s a medium that is already familiar to the user. That familiarity eases the cognitive load on learners, allowing them to direct more of their attention toward content.

Additionally, most companies already have a video sharing platform. Brandon Hall reports that over 84% of respondents either plan to add or already have a video platform set up for training purposes, making video easy to implement for brand training. Video is easily scalable. By including sharing or linking features, one video can reach any number of learners.

Best Practices for Video Training

Video can be an immersive learning experience, but without interactivity, it can be very passive. It’s easy to turn on a video and only pay partial attention. When you’re designing a training video, remember that your learners’ minds can wander easily. To combat this, keep videos short and focused: The ideal length for training videos is only 1 to 4 minutes. Break down complex ideas into shorter pieces. For instance, instead of presenting a 15-minute video that covers all of your company values, present each value in its own 3-minute video. Shorter videos give learners control over what they’re learning and provide convenient on-the-job training.

Interactivity

There are a handful of effective methods to make video training more interactive. Some use real-time prompts to make employees respond by clicking on links within the video. When done carefully, this interactivity demands the attention of learners, increasing engagement. It also provides a virtual environment to apply their knowledge, which lends to better application on-the-job.

Scenarios and Emotions

Brand training is an appeal to emotions; you want your employees to connect with your brand on an emotional level. Scenario-based videos can tell short stories that are relatable and emotionally resonant with your learners, which will help them align what they’re learning with their own behavior. Emotion can communicate brand values effectively and hold learners’ attention.

Conclusion

With the right strategy, video training can be an effective strategy for brand training. Often, the platform for providing, navigating, and sharing videos is already in place, so implementation is simple enough. When you’re designing videos for brand training, it’s important to make the content interactive and engaging in order to shape both the behaviors and emotions of your audience. But, most importantly, make sure the video content is relevant and connects your training content to key business goals.