Maximize Your Benefit of Your Software Demo

As a software product provider or vender, whether you need to make a deal, show progress to your clients, or simply illustrate how your product works, you will need to demo your software product. "We created great software products, and we need better marketing tools to demo our products to make them stand out in this competitive marketplace," is realized by software companies.

Visual software demo has been considered a highly effective way to deliver software information clearly and concisely.

If you are in the list of the following business, software demos are the most compelling way to show the features and benefits of your products to your target market.

• Enterprise Software Applications (ERP, CRM and SCM)
• Software Applications for Healthcare, Financial, Insurance and Retail Verticals
• Consumer Software Applications
• Internet Companies (E-business and Content Websites)

What are the benefits you can get from software demos?

Improve the User Experience and Accelerate the Sales Cycle
The software demos are friendly to users. They make users learn your software faster by showing them guide videos that help increasing product knowledge, reducing confusion and illustrating key benefits.

Demonstrate Product Features and Benefits
Step-by-step demos can show better of the features of your software. Demos with interactivities can show your products in a simulation way. People can learn about your product with ease and it makes your products easy to understand. Just show what your products can do for your clients with a vivid demo.

Deliver Product Information in Multiple Ways
Multiple publish options allow you to increase product exposure in multiple ways. Streaming Flash movie for Web sharing, video for video host such as YouTube, Executable file for best compatibility and it can be can be burnt to a CD or DVD for distribution.

Drive More Traffic to Your Product Website
In your software demo you can add the Website domain or the company logo inside to make more people learn about you company and go to your Website. If it is a Flash demo, you can even put a clickable button to direct users to your website.

So how to create an effective software demo to maximize your benefit?

Be familiar with your software product and create the movie script.
To ensure you do a good performance in the software demo recording, you have to know about your software very well before hand. Creating a software demo is like making a movie. You get to create the movie script. A solid script will follow good marketing and sales techniques. So ensure it properly highlights the features and benefits of the product being demoed. By continually pointing out the features of the product and then going further to explain why they’re beneficial to the users.

Do practice runs with voice recording.
Practice delivery while moving the mouse and speaking. In the software demo you will record, how much time will be spent describing an action, what will you say to highlight a feature, and when will you zoom in for details, you should learn to control the timing. During your rehearsal, ensure that you are speaking clearly and slowly. We all know that a demo with voice can show your idea better. And now screen recorder DemoCreator provides 3 ways to add the audio to software demos: record sound at capture time, record sound at preview time, import audio file to the screen recording with audio editor. You can easily make a voice-over demo.

Add illustration callouts to important actions in recording.
Now the editing features come to be popular in screen recording software. You can delete unwanted video clips, and there are multiple objects to enhance the software demos. For example, you can add zoom and pan effect to show the specific area in details, you can spotlighting an area of the recording, and you can add callouts for important actions. In one word, users can edit the demo by adding the objects to make it explicit.

Publish the software for easy online sharing.
If the technology you are using to build your demo takes forever to load, or asks the viewer to download and install a plug-in, then there would be few people watch your demo. Streaming Flash movie can be the right solution. It enables audience to start watching right away after requesting the video and to jump forward to any part with little playback delay. It can be played with the popular Flash plug-in in web browser, so almost everyone can view it readily.

Summary
To create a demo for your software product, you may go with a professional company that creates software demos, but you can also create the software demo by yourself. You are the one that knows your products very well, and you know the important features which should be shown to your clients, what you need is a tool that helps you do the recording and editing. DemoCreator can be a helpful application for you to create your compelling software demos.

Presentation Expert - Why Make ScreenCast

http://screencast-demo.blogspot.com/2009/09/screen-recording-in-software-teaching.html

Screen Recording in software Teaching and Training

In the production of multi-media courseware presentation, we often need to capture the computer screen actions of operating the application, such as tracking the movement of the mouse and the keystrokes from the keyboard, and so on. That is to make a multimedia animation presentation document from your onscreen activity. And they can be used for software training and self-learning. The research shows that screen recording applied to teaching and training receives a good result.

Multi-media technology like screen recording can be used to create virtualized scenarios combined with driven tasks for breakthroughs of the keys and difficulties in teaching. Students can view the screen recording documents online or on their computer screen. They explore independently, and exchanges opinions mutually. They work as partners to complete learning tasks, while teachers guide and support them in a timely and professional manner.

Let’s say that the teacher is having the course of how to make a good PowerPoint presentation. He shows the students the operating steps and tips with screen recording courseware and then arranges the task.

He prepares a detailed demonstration of software video tutorial recorded from computer screen (Flash video files recorded by DemoCreator). Via multi-media teaching system and network, the software video tutorials can be posted to the learning management website and the desktop machines of students. And students can watch the tutorial and operate the application at the same time, and communicate with teacher and exchange opinions with other students readily. So the teacher has enough time to understand the learning process of more students, and guides them to learn better. For some unexpected operational problems, teachers can produce tutorials and send to students to support their learning online.

There are many benefits of screen recording on computer teaching and training:

1. Fully reflect the subjectivity of students, and drive the entire class to complete the task and explore more.

2. With the video tutorials recorded from screen, it breaks restriction of time and space in learning. Usually, students listen to the teacher in the class, and then go to practice. If they don’t focus their minds, some operations or main points may be unable to grasp. And it is not practical for teachers do repeat the course. Screen recording provides a convenient way to help students to learn and explore, no matter in classes or in extra-curricular.

3. All levels of students are taken in consideration. There are some differences of learning progress among Students. It is more conducive for different levels of students if there are detailed video tutorials. Students who master fast and do some deep exploring while students who master slowly can spend more time and opportunity to consolidate their learning.

4. A big help for teachers. There will be more time for teachers to manage and guide students in computer course learning. And there will be more time for Students to collaborate with peers, and more opportunities for exchanges opinions with their teachers.

5. Screen recording documents can be done by both extra-curricular and in class. The screen recording documents need to be prepared before such computer courses. If necessary, teachers can install the screen recording software to help students deal with some unexpected problems in class. On-site recording and distributing is a necessary complement for pre-class preparation improvement.

6. In favor of post-production and application. The screen recording documents used in class can be improved in accordance with the learning performance of students because of the post-editing and publishing features of screen recorder like DemoCreator. So that teachers can make better screen recording documents, and they can be used for other classes or for the next year.

There is a sample video tutorial to show you how to add audio file to PowerPoint.