If you’re not using SlideShare in your digital marketing tactical mix, you are missing out. As Todd Wheatland said in his session at #SMMW14, ‘whatever you’re selling, there’s a business case here.’
SlideShare is a fantastic opportunity for marketers and businesses for many reasons, including:
- Huge visibility: over 60 million unique views / month
- Relevant audience: heavily business focused
- Improved search visibility: presentations posted on SlideShare tend to rank high in organic search
Below are 3 tips to help you achieve success in SlideShare:
Optimize Your Content Within SlideShare
Similar to search, great content is a prerequisite, but optimization techniques provide the extra secret sauce that result in improved visibility and views within SlideShare. Because SlideShare content also ranks well in organic search, optimizing is a no brainer. Some key things to think about:
- Keywords: as with search, including keywords which are relevant to your target audience in your title, description, tags, and presentation itself is key to achieving visibility. A great place to start your keyword research is to look at your competitors who have a SlideShare presence to see what they are competing for.
- Aesthetics: The thumbnail image is the first impression people will get of your content, so make sure it’s a good one if you want anyone to click through. Make sure your presentation pages look polished, professional, not too busy with text and represent your brand’s look and feel to the letter. Graphic design not your strong suit? Fear not, for there are plenty of excellent tools that make creating professional quality presentations easy, such as Haiku Deck, Canva and good old PowerPoint.
Promote Your Content Outside of SlideShare
A huge benefit of SlideShare is the flexibility which the format allows for you to promote your content. Embedding Slideshare presentations in external web content couldn’t be easier and the clean, minimally branded look blends well into any blog, website page, or social channel.
Great places to promote your SlideShare content are:
- Blog posts
- Social messaging
- Resources pages of your website
- As part of promotion for industry events, such as Social Media Marketing World
- Offline via printed versions
Optimize Slideshare Content Across the Sales Cycle
As with any successful content marketing tactic, it’s most effective to create optimized content in multiple formats that speak to each phase of the sales cycle. Say you have a huge, authoritative, extensively researched mega deck that you just know is relevant to your potential customers and will solve all their problems, so you throw it up on SlideShare and wait for the leads to roll in. How could that not work?
Unfortunately, for those unfamiliar with your brand or content, consuming a huge piece like that as the first touch point is asking for more attention than most people will be willing to give until they know you a little better.
In order for your content to be effective in reaching your target audience and resulting in desired outcomes, it’s important to create content that syncs with where they are in the sales cycle: attraction, engagement and conversion.
- Attraction content: short, easy to digest, low barrier to consumption (i.e. no form gating yet)
- Example: micro-messages such as quotes, industry stats, or images from your slide deck pushed out through social channels, with links to a summary deck.
- Engagement content: longer form, useful content that solves problems, answers questions, provides how-to’s, etc.
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- Example: shorter summary version of your deck, concluding with a call to action to view the full version.
- Conversion content: detailed, product / brand focused, contains direct calls to action (demo / contact / purchase)
- Example: remember your huge presentation? Now that you have brought people to it via your attraction and engagement tactics, they are now ready to consume it and take action. The final step is bringing them to key conversion areas of your website where they will be ready and willing to fill out your contact form, schedule a demo or buy your widget.
Tricks from the Pros
- Embed social widgets: SlideShare allows for including built in social sharing widgets, which you can add at strategic points throughout your presentations to encourage sharing of micro-messages. For extra credit, include pre-written social messages to help make sharing easy and on-brand.
- Collaborate with influencers: SlideShare presentations are a great format for collaboration with thought leaders in your industry. Not only will you get great contributed content, added perception of authority, but you will have a better chance of getting your content amplified to a much larger audience.
- Include hashtags: a hashtag placed strategically in your presentation title and body can help amplify your content by riding trending topics or starting a conversation when shared.
- Repurpose: if you’re not repurposing your SlideShare content into alternate formats and promoting it across varying channels, you’re not getting the full bang for your buck. If your presentations are high quality, on brand and speak to your customer’s needs, they will play well in many places.
- Try to reach the front page: gracing the front page of SlideShare by becoming a featured presentation of the day means your content will be exposed to an exponentially larger audience. There’s no short cut to achieving this coveted placement, but hopefully the above tips and tricks can give you the extra edge needed to make it.
Are you using SlideShare as part of your digital marketing mix? What are your favorite tips for success?
