SlideShare Content Marketing: A Great Opportunity for B2B

Show your professionalism to a focused and interested audience with SlideShare.

SlideShare is called the sleeping giant of content marketing. It is a huge platform full of quality content and at the same time many people do not yet realize how much SlideShare can mean for their own company or organization.

SlideShare offers both quality and quantity, especially if you focus on a business market. But do not be mistaken, SlideShare is more than a B2B platform. It also includes categories such as humour & entertainment, food and lifestyle. You can also work well with SlideShare if you focus on consumers.

SlideShare Facts & Figures

SlideShare is one of the top 150 most visited websites in the world, which is really special because the average surfing person rarely ends up on SlideShare. It is precisely people with a specific question or goal who visit SlideShare. That is more than 60 million per month, every month again.

If you focus on a business market, it is interesting to remember that SlideShare attracts 5 times as many entrepreneurs as Facebook, YouTube, Twitter or even LinkedIn.

The 10 biggest advantages of SlideShare

1. Targeted B2B audience

The people who come to SlideShare are generally focused on looking for an answer to a question or knowledge about a specific topic. That means that you have an excellent

opportunity to show what in-house knowledge you have and what you can do for someone.

2. Professional

SlideShare is a wonderful platform to show your own professionalism or that of your company. Here no vague quotes, funny or endearing pictures, but professional exchange of

knowledge and information. You know well who your audience is and with which information and tone you can best approach them.

3. A SlideShare will last a long time

Where many social media are fleeting (a tweet has a lifetime of 30 seconds on average), your presentation will last a long time. Often even longer than a year if it does not contain information that quickly ages.

4. Good for your findability

Presentations on SlideShare are well-liked via Google, because Google knows that relevant high-quality information is provided on SlideShare. You will therefore regularly see a SlideShare presentation popping up on the first page of search results. By putting presentations on SlideShare that are relevant to your company, you attract additional

audiences via Google.

5. It is a visual medium

Visual information is processed up to 60,000 times faster than information in words. You can also convey a lot more in a few images, both in content and in context. Moreover,

images like chewing gum are for the eye: they have a huge amount of stickiness.

6. Find interesting content yourself

Many social media are first assessed on the possibilities to reach a large audience themselves. But SlideShare offers you the chance to find interesting content yourself. For

example presentations of interesting conferences where you could not go, but of which you would like to know what knowledge is shared there. Or useful industry information, information about competition or trends in your field. Anyone who shares interesting content, including content from others, is more likely to be seen as an expert or source

of relevant information. That also promotes your own visibility and reputation.

7. Versatile

SlideShare contains more than just presentations, but also documents and infographics. Remember that infographics are viewed 5 times as often as presentations. So it is an

excellent place to share your infographics. Moreover, you can record videos in your SlideShare presentation and have them played to give them even more impact.

8. Embed function

You can embed a SlideShare on your own website, but just as interesting is the possibility that other websites will include your SlideShare. This greatly increases your reach. You can even compress a SlideShare into a GIF and in a matter of seconds give an impression of a SlideShare, for example on your own website.

9. SlideShare Analytics

SlideShare contains an analytics function that gives you insight into the number of times your presentations have been viewed, which presentations or infographics are most popular, whether and how many people have marked or shared something as a favourite on social media. You can also see which sources have sent the most traffic to your SlideShare presentations. Was that for example Google, your own communication tools or social media.

10. Generate leads

SlideShare has a separate function that allows you to collect leads in a professional way. By linking that function to your most important and best content, you can work specifically on a list of leads that are really relevant.

Tips for using SlideShare

The fastest way to stand on SlideShare is to upload existing PowerPoint presentations. It is also the fastest way to forgetfulness. Most PowerPoints are unfortunately still far too much on text and bullets and cannot exist without the attached story of the presenter.

Moreover, your audience at SlideShare has different circumstances and a different attitude than the audience of a personal presentation. During your presentation, the audience cannot see or listen to anything (although they sometimes flee to the smartphone).

On SlideShare, however, your presentation has plenty of competition: from mail, phone calls, colleagues, social media and other SlideShare presentations that are recommended. Your slides must therefore come from a good house to keep the attention and all competing stimuli up.

Let part of your corporate identity

SlideShares with striking visual content are the most successful. And many house styles are more likely to be a block than a tool. That is why it is smart to first translate your corporate identity into a recognizable style for SlideShare. This may require additional colours and a slightly more flamboyant style.

Provide super image

With SlideShare, image and design are at least as important as text. Therefore, take care of visual material that looks impressive and professional, is beautiful in colour and evokes emotion.

You want your image to seduce, shock, evoke a smile or invite a 'huh?'. To make your SlideShare look good, it is best to upload a PDF. In that case, your used font will also be retained (SlideShare supports a limited number of fonts when uploading a PowerPoint).

Short but sweet

Choose rather less slides than more. Try to make your point in 10 to 20 slides and use few words on the slides themselves. There they quickly become unreadable and unattractive.

Pay a lot of attention to your title slide

The time that you put in the title slide may be as long as the time that the rest of your presentation requires (with the exception of the slides with your call-to-action).

If someone searches for a specific topic and ten to twenty presentations appear, which title slides then jump out and how does your title slide relate to the other?

Add a call-to-action

Consider what you want to achieve with your presentation. Is that traffic to your site, leads or something else? Create an effective call-to-action and place it on the last page of your presentation. But if possible, add it somewhere in the middle of your presentation, especially if your presentation contains more than 15 slides. Not everyone reads to the end and a subtle call to action somewhere halfway can help you reach your goal faster.

Optimize your presentation or infographic

Take the time to write an attractive summary of your presentation in which you mainly indicate what the reader has gained from your information after reading. Think about the

keywords you want to be found on and include them in your description and in the tags you can add.