The Customer Education Playbook

7Step 5: Video or Course? Choosing the Right Content Format for the Job

It's time to consider the varying formats available to you and take some time to understand when you might want to use each one. This is really all about ensuring that you have developed a strategy for your content.

Remember first and foremost that learning is not a single event. It's a series of processes that will include multiple experiences over time, as the customer goes through a journey from awareness, to considering, to buying, to growing, and the many micro-stages in between. When you're thinking about creating these experiences, it can be helpful to consider the forgetting curve, shown in Figure 7.1.

The forgetting curve visualizes the way that learners respond to content, and the impact of practice and repetition on their retention and knowledge. As people often forget what you teach them, you need to consolidate their learning regularly, through spaced intervals of training. This can be made up of both macro- and microlearning.

Figure 7.1 Forgetting Curve

Microlearning is designed to help in the moment and should be topic-based, usually taking two minutes or less. Examples could be short articles, images, or video clips. In contrast, macrolearning is designed to teach something larger, such as a new skill, and usually takes place over several hours or days. Examples of macrolearning are courses, ...