Tips for Creating the Best Video Presentation

Video presentations are a useful communication tool in a variety of use cases. They are efficient, engaging, and easy to produce. Use them for product demos, stakeholder reports, training, sales, or any other situation where clear messaging is required.

Here is everything you need to know to create the best video presentation.

Video Presentation Benefits

Video presentations are:

• Cost-effective –It costs next to nothing to produce a video presentation. You don’t need specialized equipment or software, just video creation tools and elementary media production skills.
• Shareable –You can share video presentations across different channels with minimal adjustments. Use them on websites, social media, email, live chat, or events.
• Engaging –Watching a video is more engaging than reading a summary on a topic. It engages more of our senses and drives us towards action more easily.
• Informative –Video presentations can explain difficult concepts and ideas in an easy-to-understand way. They accomplish this by utilizing images, animation, graphs, text, speech, and other media elements.

Video Presentation Types

There are several kinds of video presentation. Here are the 5 most common types:

1. Sales presentation – Used for pitching products to customers by showcasing the item’s features, benefits, and use-cases.
2. Educational presentation – Used for educating viewers about a topic, event, or technique.
3. Training presentation – Used for teaching employees essential workplace skills.
4. Business planning presentation – Used for summarizing business plans and achievements.
5. Fundraising presentation – Used for generating interest for a business venture.

How to Create an Effective Video Presentation in 5 Steps

To create an effective video presentation, follow these 5 steps.

1. Create an Outline

Start by writing an outline. This will be your guide through the rest of production. A good outline should specify the following:

• Main topic –What is the presentation about? Why is it useful?
• Target audience – Which demographic group do they belong to? What is their level of education? What are their expectations for the presentation?
• Goal – What is the purpose of the presentation? Generating interest in a product? Attracting investors? Teaching a skill?
• Duration –  Is the presentation short-form or long-form? Will it have multiple parts?
• Key takeaways – What are the key points the audience will take away from the presentation?

2. Write a Script

Once you have your outline ready, start working on the script. There are two ways to go about this. You can either start with a rough audio recording, or write the script from scratch. 

Some people find it easier to start with an improvised version of the presentation, and then edit out the parts that don’t mesh well with the rest of the material.  Others prefer to write a demo version of the script, do a test presentation, and then edit based on feedback.

Both approaches require a lot of iteration, but this is preferable to working with an unpolished script.

3. Assemble Media Assets

Next, assemble the assets you will use as supplementary material during the presentation. Most video presentations use a combination of images, clip art, graphs, geometric shapes, and animations. Most of these can be acquired for free on stock image websites.

Audio assets such as music or sound effects are used more rarely, but they work really well in some video presentation types. Sales and marketing video presentations are the notable examples here. If you want to add audio assets to your presentation, use something subtle and non-intrusive. Audio is there to enhance the experience, not take center stage.

4. Record the Narration

In this phase you will record the narration for your presentation. Professional narrators can really bring life to a presentation, but any subject-matter expert should do an adequate job. Record in a sound-proof environment if possible, and use a quality mic.

5. Produce and Edit the Video

After you’ve assembled the assets and finalized the script, the next step is production. Most video presentations follow the slide-show format. Each slide elaborates a single concept through images, text, and narration. In this case, production simply involves adding the elements to individual slides.

A more complex approach would be to use the explainer video format. Here you would combine footage of the speaker, b-roll footage, animations, transition effects, and other visuals to create a more engaging video presentation.

10 Video Presentation Tips

That covers the basic of making a video presentation. In addition to this broad guideline, there are specific techniques that can improve the quality of your presentation. Here are 10 tips to keep in mind:

1. Share an anecdote during the introduction. This will help break the ice, and it will make the speaker more relatable to the audience.
2. Share interesting facts, statistics, and other kinds of hard data. This will make your presentation feel grounded in reality.
3. Show compelling visuals. You can use creative misdirection – present an image, ask the audience to think about it, and then subvert their expectations by providing an unlikely explanation.
4. Keep the presentation short. It’s better to have a presentation that is short but memorable, than one that is exhaustively informative, but long.
5. Use an online video creation tool for production. You will save on costs, and the results will be on par with anything you can accomplish in professional software.
6. Use visual contrast to highlight important information.
7. Be sparse with animation and other visual effects. It will help them stand out.
8. Use high-resolution images if possible. This will make the presentation scale better to screen of different size.
9. Use subtle transitions between frames. Transition effects can be quite jarring after staring at a static slide for minutes at a time.
10. Avoid adding too much information to the slides. This will make them illegible, leaving the audience to rely on your voice as the sole source of information.

Conclusion

Creating video presentations is an essential business skill. With the right tools and a bit of creativity, you can create video presentations for any occasion. If you want to put what you’ve learned to practice, try making a video presentation on Binumi. The template system combined with free stock assets and effects makes it easy to create video presentations in minutes. You can use Binumi to create other business video types as well – sign up for free and start creating quality video content.