Category: Content Marketing

How to give an engaging presentation?

Here’s what I’ve learnt over the years..

1. Start Strong: Begin with a captivating, authentic story to hook your audience from the get-go. Keep it real, don’t be on a pedestal. 

2. Interactive Dialogue: Dive into a conversational flow by asking probing questions, guiding everyone towards a shared understanding.

3. Storytelling Magic: Sprinkle in metaphors, parallels, and anecdotes to weave a narrative that captivates and connects.

Remember, the goal is to speak to each person in the audience as if you’re having a one-on-one conversation. It’s not about how much you know..but about them.

When you speak from the heart, it makes for an engaging and unforgettable presentation.. where everyone is looking in the same direction together and not at you. 

PS: and record it, any content where you flow from the heart makes for engaging content as well.

You’re struggling to create high-quality video content. What tools can help you succeed?

I see a lot of questions about the steps to create high-quality video content, the tools for scripting, hacking away at faster video production, using AI, or tricks to promote it. Here’s what I think is the most important:

Before diving into all the steps—from scripting to tools, to promotion—you need to really figure out what the goal of this whole exercise is. Because the goal for videos is not just for people to watch. It’s not about reaching them, being in front of them, or capturing their eyeballs. The goal of the video is for people to share it—to genuinely drive engagement, to compel them to comment, to start or be part of conversations. If that’s not the goal for your video content, then you’re just creating stuff like everybody else, yelling at the user. We need to move beyond eyeballs and focus on ideas that will matter to them. Because when the idea matters to them, they make it their own. They share on WhatsApp, download your videos illegally, and do all sorts of things because they’re compelled to take action and be part of it because they love it—it’s about them.

For that, you need to dive deep, research, and connect a lot of dots to come up with that creative idea. Because if you don’t have the dots, there’s no creativity.

To do this, create a list of all the pain points and the micro-moments—all the little things your audience cares about. Collect as much research as you can so you can connect the dots and create something that will matter to them. Because the direction of your efforts—in applying steps, tips, hacks, and tricks, from scripting to promotion—should be about driving engagement, about creating something worth sharing. If the direction is anything else, you’ll end up creating something that just adds to the noise, blending into the crowd.

To make your video stand out and have high-quality engagement as the goal, all the hacks in the world will align because they help facilitate and speed up reaching that goal. In the book, the process of IUCTC helps you dig deep and create a lot of those dots you can connect to come up with ideas that are worthy of sharing. These five categories (Inspirational-Useful-Celebrate-Topical-Change the world), rooted in experience and validation over ten years, are not just random thoughts or brain farts but pointers to create ideas that stick.

The million-dollar question is: what to create. Once you know what to create, scripting, tools, AI—all these things on how to create videos become effortless. It’s the “what to create” that’s the most crucial part, and everything else aligns seamlessly.

And that ‘what’ must be share-worthy—period.