Content Repurposing with PowerPoint and Video
PowerPoint? Oh no!
We can hear your groans from here.
Don’t fret though – a PowerPoint doesn’t have to be the single most boring thing ever created.
Forget all that you learned from years of poorly organized, poorly designed, and poorly delivered presentations in classrooms and meeting rooms.
Learn more in our free e-book
You can make a slide presentation compelling and you can win business. The key to success is learning how to make a PowerPoint the optimized way, and not the boring way.
Presentations are a great way to share your content, as well. There are many sites, like SlideShare, dedicated to sharing presentations. These are shared in social channels and blog posts around the web when authors need an authoritative source for a topic that they are writing about.
Creating a PowerPoint is a pretty basic task and something most business professionals learned many years ago. Of course, not all learned it correctly.
We’re going to cover the basics of creating a good presentation that people will want to share, but there’s always more information out there to learn.
1. Simplify Major Points
In a presentation, you want to simplify the major points. Slides shouldn’t have a lot of text – that’s what articles are for. It is up to your presenter or narrator to elaborate on each talking point.
Give the audience the thesis, and then expand on it with your narration. Use images to drive points home.
3. Use Graphics and Art from Previous Pieces
Take the artwork and graphics from your previous pieces to further explain each slide. Pictures can take a plain PowerPoint and make a dramatic difference.
Artwork can really tell a story. Using your graphics from other pieces also helps create a cohesive style across all the content, helping with branding.
2. Avoid Special Effects
Special effects on PowerPoint’s can be very distracting and hinder the overall experience for your target audience.
Your presentation shouldn’t be reliant on special effects, it should be the presenter and the overall information you are giving that makes or breaks it.
4. Make it Pretty
You can always add design elements to catch your audiences eye and attention.
Take photos and graphics from previous built content to use for borders, backgrounds, and illustration.
In addition to the graphics, add design elements for the fonts, borders and overall custom template.
Make a Video
If you are low on ideas, you can take the PowerPoint, set it to music and make into a video. Videos also offer another engaging format for your once static infographic. Imaging multiple panes of your previous infographics with voice over can and will tell a more thorough story of what you’re trying to get across to your audience.
Videos can also serve as the starting point (rather than the infographic or PowerPoint) in the overall content process. Individual components (graphics, etc.) from the video can then be used in other applications, using the same steps. Videos are a great tool to use to promote your business as well which will be discussed in the next section.
1. Use a Script
Don’t ever try to just “wing it” on camera. You might hit a good take eventually, but you’re going to spend far too much time editing and re-shooting. Write down what you need to say and take the time to make a coherent bullet point outline that you can work from. Avoid reading word for word, as that can force you to sound unnatural.
3. Be Yourself
If you aren’t funny, don’t try to be hilarious. Just be you. It’s simple at advice, but necessary. People can sense inauthenticity in a video much more easily than they can in any other format, so don’t try to fake it.
2. Lighting is Not Optional
You want to make sure you find someone with plenty of experience shooting video. It might be tempting to have the “techy” intern set things up, but bad lighting can easily ruin a video. We could write an entire book on how to properly light a person for a video, but we’ll spare you the details and just say this – find someone who knows how to do it.
4. Keep it Concise
Don’t stretch a video out. If you have a couple minutes of material, that’s fine. People are used to short videos on the internet and it’s painfully obvious when you are stretching it out.
Final Thoughts
1. Take apart white papers, turn into blog posts.
2. Turn quotes from your content into images and pins on Pinterest.
3. Make a list of old blog posts from Facebook. Once a week create a theme in which you promote an old post.
4. Explain a post in video format. For example, SEOmoz’s “White Board Friday” is one that has been copied and used by many different companies and brands.
5. Explore old posts or content that can be mixed and matched for creative content marketing.