integrating slideshare into your content strategy

6
Integrating SlideShare Into Your Content Marketing Strategy

Upload: lynn-miller-associates-llc

Post on 18-Feb-2016

223 views

Category:

Documents


4 download

DESCRIPTION

This eBook covers: -How SlideShare will help your business drive traffic back to your site -The keys to creating successful SlideShare content -Breakdowns and explanations of the tools inside SlideShare -How to generate leads by uploading content to SlideShare -Awesome success stories -Plus much more!

TRANSCRIPT

Page 1: Integrating SlideShare into your Content Strategy

Integrating SlideShare

Into Your Content Marketing

Strategy

Page 2: Integrating SlideShare into your Content Strategy

www.digitalsherpa.comwww.digitalsherpa.com

Integrating SlideShare Into Your Content Marketing Strategy

Facebook. Twitter. LinkedIn. Blogging. These are all popular ways that small- to medium-sized business owners are sharing highly targeted content with their followers in order to increase their brands’ online presence and attract more qualified traffic to their websites. A rising trend that is hard for businesses to ignore is the vital need to incorporate a visual element into their content marketing efforts. For this reason, SlideShare has become a powerful marketing tool for a business to clearly communicate its message to prospective buyers and customers.

So what is SlideShare? Best explained, it’s a free online hosting service that makes it extremely easy for your business to share its presentations with your online followers, customers, and prospective customers. Users can simply upload their presentations made in PowerPoint or Apple’s Keynote program to share with the 60 million visitors that the site gets per month on average, in addition to their own social networks. SlideShare has quickly become known as “The Quiet Giant of Content Marketing” with its highly targeted audience and low competition.

How Can SlideShare Help Your Business With Its Content Marketing Strategy?

Before we dig deeper into how to create an effective SlideShare presentation that generates quality leads for your business, let’s talk about how the site can be a valuable compliment to your existing content marketing strategy. Here are four great reasons why your business should integrate SlideShare into its content marketing efforts:

1. It creates brand awareness and helps your business get found online by the right people. Surprisingly, it can actually be easier to boost your search engine rankings by optimizing keywords in presentations, compared to a standard blog post. As always, it’s a best practice to use keyword-rich titles, descriptions, and tags. SlideShare presentations can also be easily embedded into other sites such as your Facebook page, blog, or website, which also drives SEO results.

2. Presentations that were created in PowerPoint or Keynote can seamlessly be uploaded into SlideShare in a format that is easy for your customers and prospects to navigate.

3. Just as you can embed your SlideShare presentations into your various social media pages and website, your readers can, too, which will help to increase your overall online reach.

4. SlideShare allows you to track the success of your presentations by showing you the number of views, comments, downloads, and more.

Page 3: Integrating SlideShare into your Content Strategy

www.digitalsherpa.com

It’s also important to take a close look at the features that SlideShare offers to business owners to help create more effective presentations. In addition to uploading your PowerPoint or Keynote presentations, you can do the following:

• Share informative, educational information with your viewers by uploading PDFs, documents created in MSOffice, OpenOffice, and iWorks, and videos.

• Create Slidecasts (a blend of SlideShare and a podcast) by syncing MP3 audio with your slides. This feature enables users to make their own webinars, recorded lectures, or musical slideshows.

• Host a virtual event to generate some buzz for your SlideShare presentation.

• Use Zipcast (a combination of slides, video, audio, and chat) to more effectively deliver your presentations. This can be done for a private audience or for all SlideShare viewers to see.

• SlideShare PRO offers users premium features such as a branded channel, no advertisements, and access to analytics.

• LeadShare is SlideShare’s lead generation service and compiles leads for you on your site and blog.

How Do You Create Successful SlideShare Content?

Now that you have a broad overview of what SlideShare is and how it can help your business to create and share powerful presentations, let’s talk about what it takes to create successful SlideShare content. If the content that you are sharing on SlideShare is of a low quality or just not captivating, you are just one click away from losing your audience. Here are three steps that you should take with every SlideShare presentation you create:

• Spend time creating content. The best-performing content on SlideShare is not only shocking and evokes emotions, but also offers some useful information that would benefit your target audience.

• Create an organized structure for your content. One of the great things about SlideShare versus using a standard blog post to get your point across is that it flows so well when done correctly. KISSmetrics suggests structuring your content like a story to best convey your message. Another effective tactic is to structure your SlideShare content like a list.

• Design captivating slides. Unfortunately, this is an area many people neglect when creating a presentation, therefore resulting in weak slides with boring imagery. That is not the way to encourage your readers to keep browsing through your presentation. For some great examples of well-done slides, check out the “How to Create Slides That Rock” SlideShare presentation.

Page 4: Integrating SlideShare into your Content Strategy

www.digitalsherpa.com

Once you’ve carefully created your presentation, it’s time to upload it to SlideShare. Thankfully, this process is straightforward; however, we have provided the quick and easy steps for you below:

• Login into SlideShare.

• Locate the Upload button on the homepage and click it. Note that you will need to upgrade to the SlideShare Pro account in order to upload videos, large files, and private content.

• Select the file that you want to upload.

• Add a title, tags, category, and description for your SlideShare content. You’re all done!

HowDoYouDriveMoreTraffictoYourSlideSharePresentation?

Now that you’ve uploaded your presentation to SlideShare, what are you going to do to drive traffic to view your presentation? Promoting your presentation is essential to increasing your online reach. Here are some great ways to encourage more readers to view your SlideShare presentation:

• Share your presentation with your social media channels, like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Pinterest. If you get a lot of views, your presentation will be featured as a “Hot on Facebook” or “Hot on Twitter” and will appear on SlideShare’s homepage. For example, you typically only need 15 to 30 views on Twitter for SlideShare to consider your presentation “hot.” If you are featured on SlideShare’s home page, you will undoubtedly get a lot views.

• Insert a URL in your call to action. A small URL can be much more effective than a “click here” link at driving traffic to your page. This is because the URL allows people that don’t recognize the live link to input the URL into their Internet browser.

• Use arrows to highlight links for people to easily share your presentation with their social networks, therefore expanding your online reach. This is especially critical if you are using clickable buttons, as people don’t always realize a link is behind them.

Your readers can serve as your best promoters for your presentations. We just talked about including social media buttons in your calls to action to allow your readers to easily share your presentation with their online networks. Another perk to using SlideShare is that your readers can easily embed your presentations on their websites, social media pages, and blogs. This process is straightforward, as well, and we’ve included some simple steps below for doing so:

• First, adjust the settings of your SlideShare content to enable others to embed your presentation in their website, blog, or social media pages.

Page 5: Integrating SlideShare into your Content Strategy

www.digitalsherpa.com

• If a reader decides that he wants to share your presentation, he can do so by clicking the “embed” button at the top of the presentation player and then clicking the “copy” button to get the embed code.

• The reader can paste or embed your presentation into a chosen page.

How Do You Use SlideShare to Generate Leads for Your Business?

As you can see from its ability to easily spread your content across the Internet, SlideShare is a powerful tool for generating quality leads for your business. To be the most successful at captivating your target audience and converting online visitors to customers, here are some ways that your business can use SlideShare as a mean, lean, lead-generating machine:

• It provides you with an opportunity to incorporate a strong visual component to your content-marketing strategy. Never has there been a more critical time in marketing to include high quality, captivating images, and this trend is only on the uptick.

• You can use SlideShare to position yourself as an industry expert by creating a presentation on a subject about which you are extremely knowledgeable. By doing so, you can help to build credibility for your brand as well as attract a new group of readers.

• You can optimize each slide of your presentation for SEO. Search engines love SlideShare content, and a presentation that has been optimized for keywords can allow your customers and target audience to find you faster on the Internet.

• By integrating your presentation across several social media channels, you are expanding your online reach and increasing the likelihood that qualified leads will stumble upon your content.

• Execute on our tactics referenced above for driving more viewers to your presentation, and continue to find creative ways to do this for both your online and offline audience.

• For the presentations that you have found to be extremely successful, repurpose that content to encourage more views.

• Be sure to embed a lead generation form at the end of each SlideShare presentation to capture more leads.

• Manage your SlideShare analytics to track your results and make improvements and changes when necessary.

Page 6: Integrating SlideShare into your Content Strategy

www.digitalsherpa.com

UsingSlideShareAnalyticstoTracktheSuccessofYourPresentations

SlideShare recently introduced its new tracking analytics tool which allows your business to gather information on how readers are viewing and responding to presentations. The tool is free to those users who upgrade to a SlideShare Pro plan (starting at $19 per month). Not only can you track how many times your presentation has been viewed, embedded, shared, or commented on, but the new “Send Tracker” feature allows your business to send out your presentation to people and track how and when they engage. For example, if you were to email out a SlideShare presentation to your address book, Send Tracker will indicate when they click through your email and view your content. You can also see how long they viewed your presentation and the amount of time spent on each slide. By knowing this information, you can determine how “hot” a lead is and where you should spend your time in assisting with the customer conversion process.

HowAreBusinessesEffectivelyUsingSlideSharetoCreateBrandAwareness?

Often, it can be helpful to see how other businesses are using SlideShare to get successful results. Here are three businesses that have effectively used SlideShare to increase awareness for their brands:

• Ethos: This unique company is recognized for its ability to help brands build presentations, and it created a SlideShare presentation to show its consumers what its brand is all about. The presentation is very simple and uses eye-catching graphics and short text to allow readers to find out who the company is without bombarding them with links to what the company does.

• Oracle: This company needs no explanation, but we wanted to mention it as Oracle is a huge believer in SlideShare and uses it often. Oracle realizes the potential of sharing highly informative content on a platform where consumers can comment, share, and pull traffic back to their website.

• The Palms Hotel & Spa: By compiling all of the perks of this luxury destination into one SlideShare presentation filled with jaw-dropping images, The Palms Hotel & Spa has been able to create this brand awareness in a place other than a traditional website.

Takeaways

In closing, SlideShare enables your business to incorporate a visual element into its content marketing strategy, which has become a marketing necessity for attracting high quality, qualified leads. This free presentation sharing site not only increases the efficiency of your content marketing efforts, but expands your online reach, allows your presentations to be easily updated, and tracks the performance of your presentations to assist with the customer conversion process. If your business is not using SlideShare today as a publishing tool, you need to take advantage of this free way to market your content today.

To learn about other ways to improve your content marketing strategy, please contact us at DigitalSherpa.