Microsoft PowerPoint and the Apple iPad are equally ubiquitous. Unfortunately, getting these two to work together can be a chore. The iPad lacks the native capability to play PowerPoint presentations — an issue that can be a real pain for today’s mobile workforce. Fortunately, there are several workarounds that can help you bring PowerPoint and the iPad together.
SlideShark
At Digital Dazzle, our go-to solution is the SlideShark viewer. This handy (and free) app makes uploading and showing presentations a snap:
Be forewarned: SlideShark doesn’t support complicated slide transitions, animations, or embedded video, so presentations that make heavy use of such features might not be the best candidates for this workaround.
Keynote
If you want to stick with native Apple tools consider Keynote. Convert a PowerPoint file to a Keynote file, and you can use this app to play the presentation on the iPad, iPhone, or iPod. And because the app works with iCloud, your presentation is almost always available. The downside? Keynote removes animations, and embedded video will work only if it’s in a format that Apple devices support: H.264 MP4 or QuickTime MOV.
Video
Of course, another option is simply to translate your entire presentation to video. As a bonus, you can upload video versions to YouTube, as long as they’re in a supported format such as MP4, FLV, AVI, or WMV. (See our blog post Two for One PowerPoint for more information about repurposing your PowerPoint presentations into videos.)
Every message tells a story, but not every story engages viewers. Great marketing pros know that creating a compelling story and using great storytelling can pump up engagement and send conversion rates soaring.
The story as foundation for a sale
When is storytelling appropriate? You can use stories in a variety of ways:
Of prime importance is deciding the action or actions you want the audience to take after hearing the story. Keep this desired response in mind as you design your storyline, using the five elements of a great story as described by the executive leadership and communications consultants at The TAI Group:
Storytelling creates an emotional and sensory experience, and therein lies its power. To help your audience understand your message, consider telling your story through a variety of methods that touch on both logic and emotion. Intriguing case studies, demonstrating a problem/solution/result scenario and credible testimonials can incorporate both emotional and fact-based, intellectual content.
Get the picture
Video, already a highly engaging medium, is the perfect foundation for storytelling. Realizing its effectiveness, B2B marketers are rapidly increasing their use of video. Business2Community reported that 52 percent of B2B marketers are now using video, a 27 percent increase from the year before. While consumer purchases typically depend on emotion, business purchases center on logic. However, this doesn’t mean B2B marketing strategies should be entirely devoid of emotion. A compelling story can engage the viewer’s mind and heart. That’s why storytelling through video can be an amazing tool for B2B companies.
The power of visualization
A study by Harvard psychologists Joshua Greene and Elinor Amit finds that pictures create vivid mental imagery, which triggers an emotional response rather than rational, cost/benefit reasoning. Consider these findings when designing a video story:
Ready to get started on your show-stopping story? Consult the experts at Digital Dazzle. We’ll help you bring your message to life!
Organizations spend a great deal of money, time, and resources developing Microsoft PowerPoint presentations. However, many miss an opportunity to get even more mileage from this investment by using the presentation as the basis for both a webinar and a video.
Webinars vs. videos
Both webinars and videos offer benefits, albeit different ones:
Webinars and videos also have differing requirements and restraints:
So how can an organization use one presentation to create such diverse products? Planning is the key.
Four steps to success
By thinking ahead, companies can head off expensive and time-consuming revisions and develop a base presentation that can form a foundation for both webinars and videos.
More collateral for less cost
By planning for both webinars and videos when creating PowerPoint presentations, companies can reduce production costs by leveraging elements in both versions. The result is an integrated, cohesive set of materials that can be used for a variety of purposes, from educational to promotional.
Integrated marketing has taken over the communications landscape. Online technologies, Web video and direct-response marketing are increasingly interconnected. This trend allows producers to communicate a message in multiple ways and increase audience interactions through a variety of touch points.
How can organizations make the most of the online bandwagon? One way that successful marketers are extending their message is by embedding video into their other marketing collateral, creating interactive video brochures.
Create compelling stories
Video brochures combine text and static graphics with embedded video to create a story that pulls in readers. These brochures — or other integrated collateral, such as white papers, data sheets and case studies — go beyond a static description of a product or success story.
The business benefits of this type of brochure are numerous. Incorporating video allows you to
Learn more about your readers
At the same time that video brochures offer a more satisfying reading experience, they can help companies learn more about readers. Video brochures are versatile tools:
Furthermore, the audio/visual content in the brochures works in a variety of materials, saving marketing dollars and tying together a cohesive messaging strategy.
What you need
To be effective, the audio/visual elements of your brochures must include some interactive elements. For example, you can give readers some level of playback control. The format of these elements should, of course, be compatible with multiple platforms and devices so that the brochure can be distributed online and will have maximum portability.
It is also important that reader action can be measured in a meaningful way. Successful video brochures feature a means to capture and store viewer interactions. These data can then be used for analysis, feedback or sales purposes.
Five factors are required to create an effective video brochure:
You can maximize your return on investment (ROI) by using professional content development. Doing so reduces the strain on in-house graphic- and content-creation resources, and working with a single provider to create multiple elements of your marketing collateral ensures a consistent message throughout.
How Can Video Be Embedded in a Brochure?
Typically, marketing collateral are created and distributed in PDF format. Adobe’s Acrobat software can embed Flash video directly into a PDF file. However, given that video makes PDF files very large, an alternative would be to host your video on a special page on your site, so the video can be played back via a browser. Added benefits would be that website analytics can track the video playbacks and changes can be made to the video page without having to change the PDF.
Brochures that integrate video encourage viewer interaction and response, making it easier to capture and measure information about viewer activity and response.
According to a new report released by Social Media Examiner last month, YouTube and video marketing top all other Marketing investments this year.
There are several reasons why online video’s popularity has increased:
Given these facts there is no reason why you should not utilize online video as part of your Marketing mix.
Moving your Powerpoint presentation to an iPad is not an easy feat, since Microsoft never released a Powerpoint viewer for the iPad. But Slideshark has - and it’s surprisingly useful.
Uploading your presentation is very straight-forward:
That’s it - you are ready to present.
On your iPad, use AirPlay or Apple’s HDMI adapter to connect to your screen and present directly from your iPad. Even better, Slideshark supports a special presentation mode where your audience sees your presentation, but you see the slides, your notes, the prior and next slides. There’s also a timer that allows you to keep track of the elapsed presentation time.
All of this works straight out of the box - we did not have to fiddle with fonts, colors, images or animations. Everything was preserved.
There are a number of Powerpoint features that are not supported:
Slideshark has instantly become our favorite Powerpoint presentation tool on the iPad. If we need video, we use Keynote. We don’t miss the lack of transition support - less is often more when it comes to presenting. And everything else Slideshark handled well.
Highly recommended!
Click on the image above to download the sample PowerPoint presentation.
Many people have seen presentations that incorporate animations. But if it has been a while since you explored Microsoft PowerPoint’s animation capabilities — either because you think they are too complicated or because you have experienced a less-than-professional animated presentation — take another look. Professional, well-executed animations can bring a presentation to life and keep viewers’ attention.
PowerPoint provides built-in animation capabilities. Some visual effects are easy to implement:
You can hide items to focus viewer attention precisely where and when you need it. In short, animation allows you greater control over your information.
Suppose you want to explain to your audience what is involved to get a new version of a product launched, including all the various tasks that your company, its suppliers and third parties have to perform. It’s not trivial to explain this succinctly, so that your audience will be able to follow along.
Rather than creating pages of pages of text bullets, an animation might be a much better way to tell the story. Just take a look at the image sequence above. Do you want to see the full animation in PowerPoint? Simply download the presentation from our website.
Of course, quality graphics and text are the basis of a well-animated presentation. Professional content development is the first step and can take the pressure off internal resources.
The Social Media Examiner recently conducted a survey of over 3,800 marketers with the goal of understanding how they are using social media to grow and promote their businesses. The information derived from the survey was summarized in the Examiner’s 2012 Social Media Marketing Report.
Here are two of the report’s primary findings:
Marketers still place high value on social media: A significant 83% of marketers indicate that social media is important for their business.
Video marketing holds the top spot for future plans: A significant 76% of marketers plan on increasing their use of Youtube and video marketing, making it the top area marketers will invest in for 2012.
Based on these findings, here are tips to help you effectively include videos in your social marketing campaign and keep up with your marketing peers:
The experts at Digital Dazzle are very familiar with optimizing video for social media. If you would like help, contact us by email or at 415.937.1791.
Mark Hosbein, a vice president with Nielsen, recently presented a series of video-focused stats and observations in a meeting with marketers from the greater Los Angeles area.
To nobody’s surprise, video viewership has increased over the last years and will certainly continue to do so this year as well. The surprising statistic was the rapid increase in mobile video viewing, by more than 200% in the last 3 years. Corresponding with that number was a decrease in desktop viewership.
This has implications for video marketeers:
If you follow these guidelines, you can be assured that your intended audience will be able to watch your videos, not matter what devices they are on.
As part of its Creative Suite 6 announcement, Adobe also confirmed pricing for its new Creative Cloud service, which allows you to use all Creative Suite applications, plus some other features, for a monthly fee - initially, $29.99 for the first 12 months, then $49.99 thereafter.
Within our digital agency, all of our employees mainly use five different adobe products - Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, After Effects and Premiere. The most affordable way to acquire these licenses for these five programs is by purchasing the Creative Suite Master Collection.
As of today, the Creative Suite Master Collection upgrade from CS5 to CS6 cost $1,399 and can be purchased from Amazon for as low as $1,145. Since Adobe typically upgrades its Creative Suite every 18 months, the Creative Cloud Service will cost us $900 per user for 18 months, or as much as the Educational version of the Master Collection would cost us, if we would qualify (which we don’t). So to us, it is a no-brainer that we will sign up for the Creative Cloud service.