The business case for interactive video

ThingLink’s new video editor allows users to amplify existing video content with context and resources from the web. While classroom use has been ThingLink’s prime example of using interactive video for educational purposes, we are now seeing the potential for interactive video also for business’ instructional goals.

Exisiting uses of interactive video: education, product marketing, and music

The early adopters of ThingLink’s interactive video service have been teachers, retail brands, and music artists managers:

Education — classroom use

Adopted by teachers and students across the world, ThingLink’s interactive videos are used daily in classrooms to enhance student’s initial understanding and retention. Teachers like it, because it allows them to engage students and add a layer of resources and interactivity to any existing video. This creates a customized student-driven learning experience within the classroom.

Product marketing — shoppable fashion videos

Interactive videos are revolutionizing product marketing. Forever21’s interactive video below is a phenomenal example of this. No more lengthy text product descriptions that bore potential customers. No more trying to puzzle piece together images with lists of features. Interactive videos allow you to combine ALL the necessary information your customers need in one captivating video. A ThingLink video enables marketers to showcase the look and feel of the product, while augmenting each product view or image with specs and even pricing information. 

Music videos — creating a full experience for fans

Magik Muzik recording artist JES used ThingLink interactive video to launch her new album “Two Souls”. This interactive video can contained 5 types of actionable links:

1. More information: A link to the artist’s bio on Wikipedia
2. Explore and buy music: JES embedded the iTunes store with an option to listen and buy tracks
3. Buy related items: Links to tour tickets through the JES website, as well as the official artist T-shirt store
4. Fan images: Links to JES fan photo carousel
5. Follow on social media: Links to the artist’s Instagram and Facebook profiles.

In this case, a recent music video launch allowed JES to showcase her entire online presence and drive fans to check out essential resources for learning more about not only her music but the artist’s overall brand.

Inspiration for interactive videos: customer support and employee onboarding

We have already seen ThingLink users creatively utilize our interactive video product. Fortunately, interactive video is still in it’s infancy as a style of media. We believe strongly that Interactive video has endless use cases in user and employee education. Here are a few other ideas to inspire your next piece of video content:

Customer Support

Is your product or service currently accompanied by a laundry list of FAQs? Maybe your video tutorials never quite achieve the depth of explanation your customers approach you for? These pain points sound like the optimal example in need of a ThingLink interactive video.

Even here at ThingLink, we use our interactive video technology to help educate you more depth and effectively about how to use our video and image products. We often find that we can point to where a specific feature is and then use our rich media tags to pop up a step by step process to explain in depth how to use or adjust a feature. For a list of related FAQs use an interactive video to walk through each of the issues and the step by step process to alleviate the issues. Instead of playing and pausing and rewinding a video over and over again to learn how to use a feature; just watch the video, click the hotspot, open the how-to tag, and apply the learning to your issue. Problems are fixed in just a few clicks.

Employee Onboarding

If you have started a professional position at a mid to large sized company, the chances are the employee experience team or HR department had you watch one (or many!) onboarding videos. Do you remember what was in them? Not likely. Did you understand all the processes and terminology they discussed? No.

Employee onboarding videos are a fantastic application for creating an interactive video. Instead of a long, drawn out monologue or dialogue by company representatives, the video can pause and explain terms and processes, give context to a situational example, or ask you to answer a question to keep your attention. The interactive nature creates pauses when viewing that allow you to stay focused and clear headed; no wandering minds. In this way, company’s waste less time as their onboarding videos actually keep the employee involved and actively learning throughout this part of the employee training.

The importance of interactive video in business is growing…get onboard.

Video consumption overall, and especially on mobile and non-mobile devices is set to increase significantly in both 2015 and 2016. (Neilsen) Therefore, it is imperative that those videos continue to disclose the depth of information and context equal to the text resources we will move away from consuming.

Interactive video will play a significant role in education, both in a traditional classroom setting as well as in surpassing business’ instructional and educational goals. We have already seen our ThingLink users tap into the endless opportunities for augmenting their content with our interactive video product. Are you using interactive video to educate your customers, colleagues or classes? Share those use cases with us. We look forward to learning with you.

###

About ThingLink for Video

A ThingLink interactive video can contain clickable hotspots such as text, images, video, music, Google Docs and maps. Hotspots appear for the viewer during video play, giving an option to explore the embedded content & resources while pausing the video in the background to hold their place.

Using ThingLink Interactive Video

Every ThingLink Video starts with an existing video. You can grab the Share code from a public video available on YouTube or Vimeo and paste it into ThingLink for Video to get started. Note: If you want to start with your own instructional video, just upload your media or screencast to YouTube or another streaming service.

1. Select Video from your dashboard.

2. Copy and paste the link to a video from YouTube or Brightcove, or Upload your own video.

3. Click the Edit icon to add tags to your video.

4. Add rich media tags to your video by copying and pasting the link or the embed code into the ThingLink tag editor.

1. These tags should expand the information existing in the video, add additional images of the products or objects in the video, or link out to content that aids the consumer in continuing on their buyer journey.

5. Change the look and feel of the tags with customization options.

6. Embed your finished video into an online learning platform, blog or website. Or, share it interactive to Facebook by just copy pasting the link to News Feed. On ThingLink, you can post it to a ThingLink channel as part of a bigger lesson.

You are now equipped with the tools to create and apply interactive video content to your company’s internal educational and instructional processes. Get creative and let us know what your employees, students, or colleagues think of your use of ThingLink for Video. We look forward to hearing from you!

Would you like to learn more about how ThingLink can amplify your company’s video and overall content marketing efforts? Schedule a Demo with one of our content marketing experts.