Savvy B2B Marketing with SlideShare
By
Steve Young
While all the attention may be on Vine, Instagram and Pinterest, there’s a little, underutilized website that savvy marketers are using to generate leads.This website is the world’s largest community for sharing presentations. With over 60 million monthly visitors and 130 million page views, it is among the 200 most visited websites in the world.
This website is SlideShare.
Besides presentations, SlideShare also supports documents, PDFs, videos and webinars.
Dubbed as the “YouTube for businesses,” SlideShare is a great resource to generate leads, especially for marketers in the B2B space.
Here are 7 tips to optimize your SlideShare presentations to generate more leads.
#1: Repurpose Content
One of the beauties of SlideShare is that you don’t have to generate new content for it.
You can repurpose your presentation, webinar, or blog post.
In fact, one of my most popular SlideShare presentations was based on a presentation that I gave at SMX West.
I did add a few more details since I couldn’t explain some of the points, but about 90% of the presentation is the same as the one I gave at the conference.You can also repurpose some of your most popular blog posts. As an example, this SlideShare is based on a blog post about how to make an animated video.
#2: Focus on Great Design
While repurposing your content, make sure your designs are best suited for SlideShare.
You want to design presentations with high quality photos, beautiful typography, and eye-catching colors.
If you’re new to design, here’s a great SlideShare presentation from SlidesThatRock:
- Creative Commons Photos: Compfight and PhotoPin
- Stock Photos (paid): iStockPhoto and Shutterstock
- Free Fonts: Google Web Fonts and Font Squirrel
- Color Schemes: COLOURlovers and Adobe Kuler
If you can afford to pay for stock photos, I would recommend it. The services listed above will allow you to purchase image sets so you can use the same model throughout your presentation.
Here’s an example:
#3: Tell Stories
“The single most important thing you can do to dramatically improve your presentations is to have a story to tell before you work on your PowerPoint file.”
– Cliff Atkinson, Beyond Bullet Points
I remember the first marketing job I had where I ran the paid search program for Walmart.com.
Before the interview, I had to Google “roi calculation” because at the time I had no idea what ROI even meant.
I was just a 25-year-old kid who was meeting with the entire online marketing department who all had MBAs from the top schools. To say I was intimidated is an understatement.
However, I researched the company, prepared for my interviews and eventually landed the job. It was a grueling interview process and my time at Walmart will always be cherished.
That job was my first taste of online marketing and I immediately fell in love with it. The ability to control different levers to grow traffic or increase sales became an addiction.
Since then I’ve been privileged enough to give talks at General Assembly, present at SMX West and even architect the SmartShoot marketplace.
I still have a lot of room for growth, but I’m sure the naive 25-year-old would be proud of where he ended up.
Remember, people relate to stories more than features or benefits, because stories elicit emotions.
And when a great story tugs at our emotions, we tend to remember it.
Talk about your mission for starting your own company, tell the story of a customer that you helped along the way, and lastly use numbers to relate to the audience, not alienate them.
The best example is Steve Jobs describing the iPod as “1,000 songs in your pocket” not “a mp3 player with 8GB of memory.”
#4: Optimize for SEO
When uploading your SlideShare presentation, take into account the SEO benefits of SlideShare.
Given that SlideShare has a page rank of 8 and ranks #129 on Alexa, you may find that optimizing your presentation on SlideShare for certain keywords can be easier to get a good ranking than on your own blog.
As an example, our viral video presentation on SlideShare ranks #6 on Google whereas our blog post on the same topic ranks #25 for the keyword “how to make a viral video.”
It is important to include keyword-rich titles, descriptions and tags so that Google and SlideShare can easily find your content.
You also want to make sure your first slide which serves as the thumbnail can be clearly read by viewers even at small dimensions (120px by 90px).
#5: Promote on Social Media
Like any part of the content marketing strategy, promotion is the key to success.
SlideShare presentations render perfectly within a blog, landing page, tweet and mobile device.
It’s also easy for others to embed your presentations onto their own blogs allowing your content to spread.You want to make sure you integrate your SlideShare presentations on all your social media platforms to get the most out of your content.
#6: Integrate Forms
If you sign up for SlideShare Pro, you’ll have the ability to capture leads with LeadShare.
When you activate LeadShare, there will be three ways that viewers can contact you about your product or service:
- When the viewer tries to download the original presentation or PDF, they will be asked to fill out a short contact form.
- When the viewer is browsing through the presentation, the contact form will show up (after slide 10, at the end, or via a permanent display button on the player).
- If the presentation is embedded on a blog, website, forum, social network etc., the lead form will appear there as well.
You can also integrate LeadShare with SalesForce CRM, using Slide2Lead, a free application that can be installed from the SalesForce AppExchange.
#7: End with a Call to Action
If you can’t afford to go with SlideShare Pro, then make sure you end your presentations with a free eBook, trial offer or any other lead magnet.When repurposing blog content I typically end the presentation with a link where viewers can read the full blog post if they’d like more information.
Another option is to create a presentation targeted toward selling a product.
Conclusion
To stand out in today’s over-saturated world, a savvy marketer must utilize stunning visuals and storytelling techniques to get the attention of its busy consumer.
For any B2B marketer, SlideShare presents a great avenue to generate leads, gain exposure, and amplify social shares.
Using the tips outlined above you will be able to maximize your presence and effort on SlideShare.
What do you think? What tips did I miss? How have you used SlideShare to generate leads? Share your thoughts in the comments below.
Steve P. Young is the Director of Product Marketing for SmartShoot, where marketers go to get stunning photos and video from the best local photographers and filmmakers. Connect with Steve on Twitter or LinkedIn.
Check out SmartShoot’s amazing video and photo marketing resources.
