Tutorials are a staple of content marketing and an effective way to attract potential customers. In general, a tutorial is a teaching method that relies on examples. Show discrete steps to complete a task.
In marketing, tutorials are a form of “help” content, especially inside a Hero-Hub-Help framework. They can create a sense of reciprocity, where the person using the tutorial feels obligated to your brand because of the helpful information you’ve shared. Also, tutorials are beneficial for search engine optimization.
Features of the tutorial
Tutorials should be concise, understandable and repeatable. Your audience should be able to follow the steps to a predictable outcome, such as task completion.
Sometimes this will be specific and prescriptive. For example: how to make lasagna. Or it could be more general, like this article: a tutorial on creating tutorials.
Tutorial structure
While we recognize a number of possible tutorial outlines, we can identify three core parts typical of any decent tutorial, including:
Description of the task or problem, overview of the explanation, demonstration of how to perform the work.
Consider a short example: how to create a “Tweet This” link to share an article on Twitter.
A “Tweet This” link makes it easy for a reader to share content on Twitter.
Description. We’ll start by describing the task: How to make content shareable on Twitter.
Create a “Tweet This” link to allow readers to share your content on Twitter and expand the reach of your content.
Overview Then provide an overview of the explanation.
A “Tweet This” link is a URL encoded that includes the content to be shared, the associated web address, and a Twitter ID. The link consists of four parts that you can easily type.
Demonstration Finally, demonstrate the process.
1. The “Tweet This” link starts with a Twitter URL.
This link points to Twitter and tells the social media platform that something is about to be shared. The “?” indicates that the parameters follow: the URL of the feed, the content and the Twitter handle of the feed.
2. Add the web address of the source preceded by the “URL” parameter and an equal sign (=).
url=
3. Include the encoded text. Here “encoded” means special characters, such as spaces, that replace a series of standard symbols to make it easier for servers to parse the content. For example, a space replaces %20.
To help encode the text, you can use an online tool such as Free URL Encoder by Eric Meyer or manually encode the copy using an encoding reference com W3 School ASCII.
In the “Tweet This” link, the content to be shared has been preceded by an ampersand (&) to add to the URL string, the “text” parameter, and an equal sign (= ).
&text=Tutorial%20articles%20and%20videos%20are%20a%20staple%20of%20helpful%20content%20marketing%20and%20a%20good%20way%20to%20attract%20potential%20clients%20to%20business%20
4. Please credit the source’s Twitter ID, which can help increase your Twitter followers. Similar to the “text” parameter described in the last step, this part of the link started with an ampersand (&) to concatenate this new section; a parameter name, “via” in this case; and an equal sign (=) followed by the parameter value.
&via=ecommerceboy
The resulting link will open a tweet editor on Twitter.
In a tutorial, show examples of the steps and conclude with the completed task.
Example tutorial
The “Tweet This” tutorial above represents the process of creating your own tutorial. Now let’s look at a favorite tutorial article, “How to “craft” product descriptions for e-commerce”, and identify these sections.
This sample tutorial includes the three fundamental sections: description, overview, and demonstration.
Describe the task. First, let’s consider how the article describes writing e-commerce product descriptions.
Writing product descriptions can be one of the biggest challenges that eCommerce businesses face. Some employers or managers may not be comfortable with writing. How about a pair of shoes, a fishing reel, or something like a hammer or screw?…
To make matters worse, a poor product description could hurt your eCommerce business. Evil can be done in two ways.
First, a poor and bland product description may not inspire a buyer to buy or give them enough information to make a good purchase decision.
Second, if you copy a manufacturer’s product description, your page or even your site may not perform well in search engines. At the time of writing, Google does not penalize sites for duplicate content unless it believes the duplication has been used to be deceptive. However, when faced with duplicate product content on multiple e-commerce sites, Google may choose only one site to display in search results.
This tutorial article explains the task at hand. It should be obvious to the reader that product descriptions are essential.
Summary of the explanation. The article then explains how to solve the product description writing task.
Given the problem of what to write (a form of writer’s block) and the danger of posting poor product descriptions (lower conversions or duplicate content), some online stores may want to take a mechanical approach to creating (writing ) product descriptions.
The idea is simple. Instead of sitting in front of a keyboard, looking at a picture of your product, or trying to rewrite the manufacturer’s description, follow a process.
Demonstrate how to complete the task. The product description tutorial article describes a seven-step process, two of which are called optional, for consistently crafting good e-commerce product descriptions.
At each step of the process, the article provides an example product description, specifically for a soup spoon.
After the first step, “Focus on one thing,” the description of the spoon is a single line.
This soup spoon has a large bowl.
By the end of step three, “Clarify and Specify,” the description of the spoon begins to take shape.
This soup spoon has a large bowl. In fact, this soup spoon can hold about three times more soup than your standard table spoon. So you get more soup with every bite.
The final product description has grown significantly before the reader’s eyes.
Hungry for hearty chicken noodle soup or creamy clam chowder? This soup spoon has a large bowl for carrying biscuits and broths to your mouth. In fact, this soup spoon can hold about three times as much soupy goodness as your standard table spoon. You can take triple the bites or buy this scoop and drink large.
Beyond helping customers
Tutorials like this are a key type of content, whatever the purpose journalism or marketing When your company creates tutorials, you’re not just helping customers. You are providing a marketing tool that attracts potential customers and drives them to your business.
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