August 29, 2014: Kevin Lee, in ClickZ this month, writes that “many businesses have a lot of good content – real intellectual property – trapped in PowerPoint slides that, if liberated, could be very useful for content marketing.” Slideshare (now owned by LinkedIn) provides these marketers an outlet that can serve as a powerful content marketing channel.
Kevin advises a set of best practices for content marketers when they’re uploading content to Slideshare, including the following:
1. Keep Presentations Brief. The most popular, widely shared SlideShare presentations tend to be short and punchy. Resist the temptation to simply port your PowerPoints over to the platform. Tighten up the content, focus your message, and eliminate any content that doesn’t directly support your presentation’s main points. Remember, the SlideShare audience is more impatient than any audience you’d find in a corporate conference room. (Frankly, I don’t think that 177-page PowerPoints should exist even on a hard drive, much less a public area like SlideShare). On SlideShare, less is definitely more, but don’t go overboard with brevity – a three-page presentation with your logo on final screen looks like a cheap piece of promotional literature, not a presentation that actually imparts useful knowledge.
2. Break Out of the PowerPoint Visual Stereotype. There are a lot of SlideShare presentations that fail to impress because they’re so obviously repurposed PowerPoint slides replete with PowerPoint fonts, bullets, animations, etc. To succeed on the platform, you need to create something that looks fresh and unique. There are a number of free, cloud-based presentation-generating services, including Canva and Haiku Deck, that can output presentations that break the PowerPoint visual stereotype. While there’s some learning curve associated with getting up to speed on these services, the results are definitely worth the time invested.
3. Include a Strong, Focused Call to Action. Unlike a presentation shown in a conference room, where, if the presentation is successful, the next action to take place is a sales discussion, your goal on SlideShare is to convince your presentation’s viewer to click on an embedded hyper-linked image, usually placed in the presentation’s final screen, which will take him/her further into your sales funnel. Many presentations on the platform simply end on the words “Thanks!” or trail off inconclusively. This is a huge lost conversion opportunity. So is routing people from your presentation to a generic home page. Use the same landing page principles you apply in PPC – create a granular destination page that’s as relevant as you can make it to the presentation it’s being linked from.
Read complete article on ClickZ.com.
- 10 Mistakes to Avoid When Using QR Codes for Marketing - September 20, 2023
- Kevin Lee on How AI Changes the SEO Landscape - August 31, 2023
- The Power of Compound Marketing: Kevin Lee Presents @ 1MediaWorld 2023 Global Conference - March 7, 2023