The power of video demos

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We added video demos to our Light content management system website about four months ago. I've noticed that the video demonstration page has quickly become one of the most frequently visited pages on our website. This tells me that video demos can be a very powerful tool.

People use screencasts or video demos for all types of purposes. Sometimes they are support-oriented or provide advanced help on difficult subjects. In our case, we have used them for marketing. Our four demos on Light run about 8-10 minutes each. The first three cover the basics of using Light -- Your Account, Your Designs, and Your Content. The fourth video takes it just a step further and overviews a few Other Features of Light that people commonly have questions about like using custom domains and SEO tools.

Prior to the video demos, we offered live demonstrations. They worked well, but video offers so many advantages over live. Interested customers are able to view the videos any time they want without having to meet a demonstration schedule (very important for our international customers). Plus, I think many people prefer to watch a video rather than participate in a personal meeting. Our videos have been able to reach far more people than we could possibly reach with live demonstrations, and we haven't heard any negative feedback about moving this direction. All in all, I think videos are a great choice.

If you haven't checked out the demonstration videos for Light, why not give them a look. You'll learn a lot and also get to hear my voice, which really makes it all worthwhile.

Posted on Fri, October 5, 2007 by Tim Wall

5 comments (Add your own)

1. Michael Dick wrote:: I agree, videos are very powerful! There are many apps that allow anytime access to a demo setup and this leads to users not fully understanding the true power of your app, simply because they may ignore one of the most important features due to not understanding it. Videos help remove that, they let the user see what they need to be seeing and see the app being used how it's suppose to be used. Videos were good. They helped a lot more than the few minutes I spent clicking around in a free account :).
Fri, October 5, 2007 @ 11:31 AM
2. Scott Magdalein wrote:: What's the possibility of you telling us what service or software you used for those demos...just in case we wanted to offer similar demos on our site for clients to learn how to use your CMS.
Sun, October 7, 2007 @ 11:45 PM
3. Tim Wall wrote:: No problem, Scott. I used CamStudio, which is a free screen recorder software. It is no frills but gets the job done to record the video files. But then, to encode them for the web, I used On2 FlixPro, which is not free, but in my opinion it does the best job of encoding flash video because of its multi-pass variable bit rate encoding process. It allows me to resize them down with minimal quality loss and to keep the file size small. And, we built our own little flash player to display the videos on the web. Hope this helps.
Mon, October 8, 2007 @ 8:52 AM
4. Michael Dick wrote:: I've used Camtasia Studio (differnt than CamStudio) in the past, It's not free but it has a great trial period. You can output the videos as pretty much any file type (including flash).
Wed, October 10, 2007 @ 10:35 PM
5. Tim Wall wrote:: Yes, Camtasia Studio is a great product and it lets you do a lot of neat editing tricks and such. It was just overkill for what we needed on our videos so we decided to save the money. By the way, Camtasia can output to flash, but it doesn't use two pass variable bitrate encoding so the quality is lesser than that which you get by encoding with On2 (in my opinion).
Thu, October 11, 2007 @ 8:22 AM

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