3 Reasons You Need Videos in Your Presentations

Humans love trends. From fashion trends like tight-rolled jeans in the 80s to home design trends like the farmhouse craze of the 2010s, nearly every field has their trends. As a presentation design agency, we like to keep up with the trends in our field too. One of our favorite current trends is presentations which incorporate more dynamic visuals like animations and videos.

Presentations of today aren’t static. They feature moving elements. Today we want to talk specifically about videos in presentations. We’ll share 3 reasons, backed by powerful statistics, why presenters are using more videos in their slide decks. It all has to do with retention, sharing, and interest.

Retention

Viewers retain 95% of a message when they watch it on video, compared to 10% when reading it in a text.

This study was cited in a Forbes article which covers social media strategy. But what does social media strategy have to do with presenting? A lot. As humans, the way we share and consume information is always changing. So as we engage more frequently with social media platforms, it changes the way we are used to gathering and consuming information. For example, it wasn’t that long ago that our parents or grandparents had a daily or weekly newspaper delivered to the front door. I can still picture my dad sitting in “his” chair and can hear the sound of him turning those big, thin pages of the newspaper every Sunday afternoon. Today, he gets his news the way most of the rest of the world does, on a smartphone.

We are learning in different ways than we used to. So giving a presentation without dynamic elements is a bit like asking your audience to pick up a printed newspaper. Not only are videos one of our primary means of consuming information these days, but they are better at helping us to retain information. Much better.  So if you want your audience to remember the content you share, consider putting some of it in video format.

Sharing

Videos are shared 1200% more times than links and text combined.

If you want your presentation to have a life beyond the actual presentation time, videos can help make that happen in two ways. First, if you include videos in your slide deck, make a way for the audience to share those while also embedding ties back to your company or product or presentation. Drop a brand name or logo in the corner of the video, or add a link at the end of it which leads back to your website.

Second, consider recording your presentation so that your audience has the ability to share it with others. When I present, I usually leave time following my presentation to talk with audience members. One of the most common things audience members ask me is “will a recording of this be available?” If I make my presentation available in video format, I continue its longevity and reach by putting it in a sharable format.

Interest

75% of viewers will stick with a video that’s 60 seconds in length.

Communication coach and Harvard instructor Carmine Callo shares this statistic and goes on to say, “Thirty to sixty seconds is ideal for a presentation video. It adds a multi-sensory element to the presentation, breaks it up nicely, and keeps people interested in the content.” We aren’t asking you to turn your whole presentation into a video. You are still the star of the show. And you, as the presenter have a personal, real-time influence as you interact with your audience that video simply doesn’t have. However, if you can incorporate small “slices” of video content into your presentation, you’ll add another element. And video is a like an old friend to most of your audience members. They are used to engaging with dynamic visuals in their everyday lives and will see it as a welcome and familiar form of media.

The thing about trends is that some of them pass through pretty quickly. And in the case of things like hair crimpers and dot matrix printers, we are glad when something new comes around. But we believe videos in presentations has great staying power, and for good reasons like retention, sharing, and interest.

Ready to learn how to embed videos into your presentation? We could offer you a series of steps. But instead, we’ll take our own advice and suggest that you watch this simple tutorial video.

Or, reach out to one of our presentation design experts who can help you take your slide deck to the next level.

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