Are Presentation Aids Beneficial in Videos?

Here's a question often asked by those who are doing video production for their Network Marketing training and informational videos.

"Do presentation aids actually help with the video?"

Presentation aids DEFINITELY make a difference in the effectiveness of your videos. Especially if it's just you sitting in front of the camera talking. Therefore, you need to learn how to produce simple ones and learn how to integrate them into your videos.

But be aware, only use these when they increase the clarity and effectiveness of your speech, if they are pointless, you might lose your audiences attention.

An interesting statistic is that recent research has shown that we typically remember only 20% of what we hear, while that number jumps to 50% when we both hear and see something.

Well designed presentation aids also enhance your credibility in the eyes of the audience. They show the listeners that you took extra effort in preparing something to help them better understand what you are saying.

These aids also improve your ability to get the message across. It gets you involved with your audience and not just standing there talking monotone like your least favorite professors did. (some of my professors do this and makes lectures a sleeping hour) This also helps with if you are nervous, just show the picture or share a graph/powerpoint with the audience, it helps to relieve some of that stress since they won't be focusing solely on you!

So it seems like presentation aids are great, right?

Just like anything else, these can be a disadvantage in your videos. You want to be aware of these potential problems to make sure you avoid them.

Presentation aids distract listeners, and if they are used incorrectly, your audiences attention will never come back to you.

These also can distract you, the one doing the video. How is that? If you haven't properly prepared what you are going to say while sharing the presentation aid, you'll probably lose track of what you are saying and this will definitely cause your presentation to struggle. In the end, causing the viewer to leave your video.

Presentation aids can be a great thing, but can also be a terrible thing. In my next post, I'll talk about some ideas for presentation aids.