You’ve probably done a few marketing or sales presentations in your time. A slide deck here, a slide deck there. You’ve developed slides for new customers, potential customers, workshops, seminars, classes, your business and referral groups, a local startup incubator, a local TED talk. When a new opportunity comes up, you dig through your archive of previous presentations for something that’s either spot-on or can be quickly edited to fit the new need, and off you go.
But what happens after the presentation is over? Unless your presentation was recorded (not always available), you’ve only managed to reach the audience members who were able to be at your presentation
You’ve done a great job putting together visually attractive and informational slide decks for those people. But you can do better. You can repurpose your deck for greater reach to your target audiences and potential leads. Here’s how.
Share on SlideShare
The absolute easiest thing you can do to increase the reach of your presentations is to put them on SlideShare. SlideShare accepts PowerPoint, Keynote, and PDF files, so no matter how you’ve prepared your files, it’s likely the platform can handle them. Since LinkedIn acquired the service, it’s been rebranded to LinkedIn Slideshare, but the functionality is essentially the same, with a few more bells and whistles.
If you already use another slide-sharing platform, consider adding SlideShare to your roster.
The LinkedIn Slideshare site gets a ton of traffic—according to their latest data, 70 million unique visitors a month. More importantly, 80 percent of that traffic is from organic search because Google indexes each presentation on the site (which may help your SEO). The platform automatically creates a transcript of all presentations, which increases accessibility and search engine visibility, and optimizes presentations for mobile viewing. It also provides a nice set of analytics on your audience and engagement. And it’s free.
To get the most out of SlideShare, do the following:
- Link to additional information on your website in your presentation—a blog post or landing page—to give the reader a reason to visit you
- Link to, or embed, a form for a lead magnet, such as an ebook, a checklist, etc.—keep the information you’re asking for simple and short (full name and email, for instance) unless you’re looking to further qualify your leads
- Make sure the first slide in your presentation is attractive and attention-getting—it displays as a thumbnail when you share your presentation
- Customize your profile to reflect your brand identity
- Add your presentation to your LinkedIn profile from SlideShare
- Consider embedding the slide deck into your website, a blog post, or a newsletter—this adds to your reach and also gives you access to SlideShare’s analytics
Publish a Book or Ebook
It may seem like a leap to go from sharing on SlideShare to writing and publishing a book, but bear with me.
You aren’t writing the great American novel (unless you are—that’s for another time). You’re writing a book that will help your business and your brand by providing relevant, useful information on your products and services to potential customers. Isn’t that what your slide deck does? Then that’s what your book will do.
There’s no need to recreate the wheel. You have all the facts, figures, charts, graphs, photos, inspirational quotes, case studies, and marketing copy you need to get started. Your book doesn’t have to be overly long, your chapters don’t have to be of equal length, and you don’t need to be a world-class writer—you just need a book that explains the benefits of using your service or product, which is something you do every day.
There will be aspects of your slide deck that don’t translate well into a book, and there will be details you want to add to the book that would be overkill on a slide. You’re repurposing your content, not replicating it.
One advantage to reusing your slide deck content is that you have likely already focused it for a specific audience. This means you could potentially make a series of short books, each based on a different slide deck, concentrating on the benefits of a specific business offering to a specific target market.
Not only will your book help you better explain your products and services to potential customers, it will also add to the credibility and trustworthiness of your business and of you as its representative. Don’t discount the power of reputation—it tends to precede you in all aspects of life.
How should you produce your book? You don’t necessarily have to print it, though we’re partial to the branding potential of printed books. Consider making it an ebook and using it as a lead magnet on your website. If interest grows, you can do short runs using print-on-demand and hand your book to prospects in person at events and trade shows.
Expand Your Opportunities
It’s not easy reaching the right prospects at the right time, but by repurposing the marketing and sales content you’ve worked so hard to develop, you can cast a wider net for prospective customers and leads.
