Step by Step Guide to Slideshare Marketing

1HUBSPOT - The Step-by-Step Guide to SlideShare Marketing

Introduction
We all know that creating targeted, high-
quality visual content has been a part of the
marketing playbook for several years now.
However, getting people to actually see and
engage with that visual content continues to
be something that marketers struggle with.
What’s more, getting viewers to convert
on visual content (i.e., become a lead in
your database) continues to be an elusive
proposition. After all, if you’re displaying
a presentation or an infographic, where
exactly are you supposed to put the form for
collecting a viewer’s information?
Enter SlideShare.
Founded in 2006, SlideShare is a global hub
of professional content. With over 70 million
professional users and 17 million uploads, it’s
one of the top 100 most-visited websites in
the world. Being a LinkedIn company, it’s easy
to use SlideShare to cultivate professional
relationships and business opportunities.
SlideShare isn’t just a tool for embedding
presentations in your blog posts and web
pages: it’s a full-on social network that has
the potential to expose your content to
thousands -- even millions -- of prospective
leads and customers.
At HubSpot, we discovered the power of
SlideShare firsthand when we uploaded our
“Culture Code” slide deck a few years back.
To date, that deck (which details how HubSpot
goes about creating a lovable company) has
been viewed more than 1.6 million times.

Of course, attracting eyeballs -- while certainly
helpful -- isn’t the end goal of marketing.
Ultimately, you want those eyeballs to
convert into leads and, eventually, close as
customers.
From a lead generation perspective,
SlideShare offers a wealth of untapped
opportunity. Using their lead capture tools,
you can build custom forms and control
where, when, and how many of those forms
appear in your content.
You can then dive into SlideShare’s Lead
Dashboard to see how many leads those
forms have been generating and use
SlideShare’s analytics to get an overall
picture of how your content is performing.
Ultimately, there are several steps you need
to follow to ensure you’re getting the most out
of your SlideShare marketing. In this guide,
we’ll walk you through all of those steps and
offer insights and pro tips along way.
Let’s get to it!

TABLE OF CONTENTS
Step 1: Creating the Presentation ... pg 5
Step 2: Setting Up Lead Capture Forms ... pg 13
Step 3: Promoting the Presentation ... pg 17
Step 4: Measuring Performance with Analytics ... pg 21

CREATING THE
PRESENTATION
It all starts with great content. And great
content, of course, starts with a great idea.
Fortunately, there’s a good chance you
already have that great idea for your next
SlideShare lying around.
Remember that awesome slide deck you
made for your last company meeting? Or
that stellar speech you gave at that industry
event a few months back? Revisiting the
slides from those presentations is a simple
(yet effective) way to get some inspiration for
new SlideShare content.
But slide decks aren’t the only type of content
you can repurpose for SlideShare. By looking
through your backlog of blog posts, webinars,
podcasts, ebooks, and other resources, you
should be able to uncover a treasure trove of
topics that you can create SlideShare content
around.
The most important thing to consider when
outlining your new SlideShare presentation:
it needs to tell a compelling story.
As Tourism Australia’s Head of Social,
Jesse Desjardins, noted in his SlideShare
presentation You Suck At PowerPoint! (which
has 2 million+ views): “Before you become a
master presentation designer you must be a
great storyteller first.”

Here are a few quick tips for telling a great
story on SlideShare:
Consider Your Story’s Characters
Who is guiding your viewers
through the narrative? You?
One of your buyer personas?
Establish your story’s characters
and give your viewers reasons
to care about those characters.
Set the Scene
Where are your characters? What
challenges are (or were) they
facing? Once you’ve established
the “who,” you need to establish
the “where” and the “what” (and
the “when”) in order to provide
context and pull your audience
into the story.
Make Your Point
What is the underlying “why”
of your story? What point are
you trying to get across? Don’t
think of your presentation as
a collection of loosely related facts and
figures; the information on each slide
should be sequential and build toward your
presentation’s main point or argument.
Keep in mind that these storytelling tips are
just that: tips, not rules. Innovative storytellers
can (and do) stray from the formula outlined
above and are able to find success. But if
you’re just starting out, these tips can help
guide your thinking.
Once you’ve got your story all figured out
-- and ideally, written out -- it will be time to
turn your attention to design. While this may
seem like the fun part of the process, it’s
also one of the most crucial parts.
Ultimately, even if you have a compelling
story to tell, great design can mean the
difference between a high-performing
presentation and a low-performing one.
With that in mind, here are some SlideShare
design best practices you can follow.

Typeface/Font Selection
As a general rule, you should use a bold
typeface for your slides’ headers, and a
simpler, cleaner typeface for your slides’
body text.
The reasoning behind this approach is
easy to grasp: Headers are meant to attract
eyeballs and tee up the general theme of
a slide -- thus, they need to be bigger and
bolder than your body text.
In contrast, the body text is responsible for
clearly conveying the “meat and bones” of
a slide. Hence, the typeface you use here
should be optimised for legibility.
Color Considerations
When designing your presentation, pick a
color scheme and stick to it.
Not sure what colors to use? There are
several free resources (like Adobe Color CC)
that can help. At the most basic level, just
be aware that certain color combinations are
more pleasing to the eye than others ... and
this isn’t just a matter of personal preference.
Color harmonies, or schemes, are based on
the color wheel.
Complementary colors, for example, refer to
two colors that are directly opposite each
other on the color wheel. When you put
complementary colors next to each other in a
design, the result is usually quite harmonious.
(Image source: SlideShare)

In addition to thinking about color scheme,
you’ll want to think about contrast, or the
difference between the darkest and lightest
elements of your slides.
For the purposes of building a SlideShare
presentation, think of contrast this way: Dark
elements should always go on top of light
elements and light elements should always
go on top of dark elements. This ensures that
all of the elements in your slides -- including
copy -- will be easy to see.
For a deeper dive into the world of color,
check out this post on the HubSpot blog:
“Color Theory 101.”
Visuals
To be sure, you can communicate your
message simply and effectively using text
and a background color. But if every single
one of your slides uses that same format,
you run a serious risk of having a boring
presentation. To keep your slides fresh and
exciting, you need to mix in some compelling
visuals. Here’s how:
When you have a slide that’s slated to use a
small amount of copy, try using a high-quality
photo as the background instead of a color. A
photograph can help you strengthen a slide’s
message and will also add some visual variety
to your presentation.
To ensure that your text is legible on top of the
photo, simply use a semi-transparent overlay.
This overlay will create some contrast for
your text without completely blocking out the
background photo.
Light
on
Dark
Dark
on
Light

When visualising data (i.e., with charts and
graphs), there are also some best practices
you can follow.
For example, if the data you’re visualising
shows a comparison of different categories,
a bar chart is probably your best option.
Alternatively, if your data compares parts
or percentages of a whole, a pie chart
might work better. A third option is the line
chart, which is ideal for displaying trends,
acceleration, volatility, and other data that
changes continuously over time.
To learn more about data visualisation best
practices, check out our free guide, Data
Visualisation 101.
Title Slide
While we’ve all heard the idiom “Don’t judge
a book by its cover,” the reality is that people
do judge books by their covers all the time.
And with SlideShare, the “cover” people will
be judging your presentation on is the title
slide.
In addition to being the first slide viewers
see, your title slide serves as a thumbnail or
preview image on slideshare.net and when
people share your presentation. Dedicating
some extra design attention to your title slide
can help boost views and social sharing.
For starters, make sure your title slide
uses big, legible text so potential viewers
can easily discern what your SlideShare
presentation is about. You may also want to
consider incorporating a visual metaphor, i.e.
a visually appealing photo or graphic that
represents (or hints at) your presentation’s
topic. (For example, if you were creating a
SlideShare about infamous marketing slipups,
an image of a banana peel could serve as
your visual metaphor.)

Pro Tip: 2 Shortcuts to Great Design
1) “Buy it: Good design costs money. Invest
in professional images and typeface. A little
$$$ can give you significant advantage.”
2) “Steal it: You can reverse engineer almost
any good design. Take apart your favorite
presentations, infographics, websites and
figure out how it’s done and remix it into
something new.”
-Jesse Desjardins / You Suck At PowerPoint!
1. Title
2. Description
3. Tags
4. Your slides
If you’re wondering how including keywords
in your actual slides (which search engines
can’t crawl) can be beneficial, here’s the
scoop: SlideShare automatically transcribes
the text in your slides and sticks it beneath
your presentation on slideshare.net.
And while you definitely, definitely shouldn’t
stuff keywords into your presentation (or
any piece of content, for that matter), you
should be aware that the copy you choose
to include in your slides can affect how your
presentation shows up in search.
Optimising Keywords
Truth be told, optimising keywords won’t make
your SlideShare presentation look any better.
However, it can help make your presentation
easier to find. (And after all, what’s the point
of putting in all that hard work to make a
beautiful presentation if no one sees it?)
To get the biggest search bang for your buck,
you should include your target keyword(s) in
these four places:

Adding Calls-to-Action
While the main goal of creating your
SlideShare presentation may be to generate
leads (more on that in the next section!), you
can also use your presentation to drive traffic
to other content you’ve created. The simplest
method for doing this is to incorporate
hyperlinked calls-to-action (CTAs) into your
presentation.
With the exception of infographics, all of
SlideShare’s supported file formats support
hyperlinks. You can add these links to your
slides directly in PowerPoint or with a tool
like Adobe Acrobat.
A common approach is to include a
hyperlinked CTA on the last (or next-to-
last) slide in your presentation so you can
point viewers to other resources they might
find valuable. Keep in mind that you’re not
allowed to use hyperlinks in the first three
slides of your presentation (even if you try to
add them, they won’t work).
Also: the left and right sides of SlideShare
presentations are reserved for navigating. So
for best results, try to keep your CTAs near
the centers of your slides.
Uploading
Once you’ve finished writing, designing, and
optimising your SlideShare presentation,
you’ll be ready to upload it. To do this, simply
log in to your SlideShare account, click the
orange “Upload” button at the top right of
your screen, and either drag and drop the
file icon for your presentation inside of the
dotted upload area OR click anywhere inside
of the dotted area to search for the file on
your computer.

Note: if you don’t want people to see your
SlideShare right away, make sure to select the
“Private” option during the upload process.
You can always make your presentation
public later.
Once you’ve successfully uploaded your
presentation, choose a category from the
dropdown menu, add a (keyword-optimised!)
description, and add some tags. As you
complete these actions, you should see your
“Virality Score” on the right hand side of the
screen start to increase. This estimates how
“shareable” your presentation is likely to be.
Next, hit “Save & Continue” and you’ll be
presented with some social buttons for
sharing your presentation across your social
networks as well as an embed code for
embedding your SlideShare on your website.
At this point you might be thinking to
yourself, “SlideShare marketing? Mission
accomplished! My presentation is finished
and ready for sharing.”
But even though you’ve successfully created
and uploaded your presentation, there are
still several more steps you need to take if
you want to use SlideShare to its full potential.
1
2

There’s just one important thing to remember
should you decide to go that route: SlideShare
makes a .pdf version of your presentations
available, form-free, by default. To turn this
feature off -- and to force viewers to visit your
landing page for the .pdf version of a particular
presentation -- go to “Privacy Settings” and
select “No” next to where it says “Allow users
to download?”
Of course, the most direct way to generate
leads with SlideShare is to use their built-in
lead capture tools. These tools allow you to
create and customise forms -- and manage
where and how frequently they appear --
right within your SlideShare account.
All of the contact information you gather gets
stored in your account as well, and you can
export that information as a CSV file if you
want to do some deeper analysis.
SETTING UP
LEAD CAPTURE
FORMS
As you may have already figured out, there
are a few different ways you can generate
leads with SlideShare.
Remember those CTAs you added to your
SlideShare presentation earlier? By pointing
those CTAs to landing pages -- where
someone can download a related piece of
content after filling out a form -- you can
certainly generate leads (albeit indirectly).
A variation on that approach is to send
SlideShare viewers to a landing page where
they can download a .pdf version of the
presentation they were just viewing.

Ready to start capturing leads with
SlideShare’s new tools? Here’s how you do
it:
1. Log into your
SlideShare account
and navigate to
“Lead Dashboard”
(it’s in the dropdown
menu that appears
when you hover
over your logo).
2. Choose “Create new lead form” under
the “Lead Collection Campaigns” header.
3. Give your lead form a name. (Only you/
your team will be able to see this.)
4. Write a short form headline that explains
what a viewer can expect after filling out your
form. (Will you be sending them additional
resources? Or updates about your products/
services?)
Note for HubSpot Customers:
Our marketing platform now integrates
with SlideShare’s lead capture tools. A
contact’s timeline will now display the
name of the SlideShare presentation
a person converted on, as well as the
specific slide number they were on.

5. Select the fields you
want to have appear
in your form. You also
have the option of
adding custom fields.
When deciding on how
many fields to include,
remember this general
rule: fewer fields =
higher lead quantity;
more fields = higher
lead quality.
6. Choose where your lead form will appear.
At HubSpot, we tend to put our first lead
form after slide 10 of our presentations. Our
thinking here is that it allows viewers enough
time to get engaged with the content without
immediately interrupting them.
But at the same time, the form still pops up
early enough that if a viewer doesn’t end up
sticking around for the whole presentation,
we still get a chance to ask for their info.
Of course, some viewers will make it to the
end of your presentations, which is why it’s
a good idea to include a form there as well.
There’s also an option to have the form
appear when someone downloads your
SlideShare as a .pdf (which means you
don’t have to go through the extra step of
sending someone to a landing page on your
website if you want to generate leads with
that content!)
7. Decide whether you
want your lead form to
appear for all viewers
or just for viewers in a
targeted region. This
feature allows you to
personalise particular
forms for particular
markets/languages.

And there you have it: your SlideShare
account is now a lean, mean, lead-generating
machine.
If at any point you can’t remember which of
your SlideShare presentations are using the
lead form(s) you created, simply click on the
blue “ ” buttons.
To see all of the
contact information
you’ve collected from
all of your forms,
click on the blue “All
Campaigns” link.
To see the contact information you’ve
collected from specific forms, click on the
name of the form.
Not impressed with the number of leads
you’ve generated so far? Don’t worry: in the
next section, we’ll go over some best practices
for promoting your SlideShare presentations
so you can boost those lead gen numbers!
8. Select the SlideShare presentations
you want the lead form to appear in. If you
choose “A selection of my SlideShares,”
click on the (0 selected) link and you’ll be
taken to a library of all of your presentations.
You can then scroll and select the specific
presentation(s) you want the form to appear
in.
9. Click the “Create lead form” button.
10. Your lead form is
now saved in your Lead
Dashboard.Under“Status,”
make sure the toggle is set
to “Running,” not “Paused”
(assuming you’re ready to
start capturing leads!).

Now, on the other hand, promoting
SlideShares presents some truly unique
opportunities. And those SlideShare-
specific promotional opportunities are what
we’ll look at in this section.
Blog Versatility
Embedding SlideShare presentations into
your blog posts is by no means a revolutionary
promotional tactic. However, what some
marketers might not be aware of is just how
many different ways you can incorporate a
SlideShare presentation into a post.
Allow the head of HubSpot’s marketing blog,
Ginny Soskey, to explain:
Strategy 1: Let Your SlideShare Tell The
Story
“The first distribution strategy you can do
is probably the least intensive: you let the
SlideShare tell the entire story for you. This
means you’re really not doing much in the
blog post -- probably a quick intro, embed
the SlideShare, add a call-to-action, and voila
... it’s ready to be published!”
PROMOTING THE
PRESENTATION
On the one hand, promoting a SlideShare
presentation is just like promoting any
other piece of content: You can organise a
campaign around the content and create a
bunch of promotional assets for emails, your
blog, and your social platforms. And then
when all the pieces are in place, you can
have a coordinated, multi-channel launch.
(Note: This is a very
simplified overview
of how content
promotion works. For
a deeper dive into
this topic, check out
our Comprehensive
Guide to Content
Promotion.)

Strategy 3: Give Small Teasers of the Rest
of the Post
“Sometimes, what works best for your
SlideShare audience might be different
than what works for your blog audience.
They might both like similar topics, but
SlideShare users may like short-form,
clickable content while your blog readers
lap up long-form, textual content. In that
case, you can use the SlideShare slides as
teasers of the points you expand on in the
rest of your post.”
Social Rewards
One of the most unique (and arguably, coolest)
features of SlideShare is that it dedicates its
homepage to highlighting high-quality and
highly viewed SlideShare presentations.
From a promotional perspective, the most
exciting section on the SlideShare homepage
is the “Trending in Social Media” section,
which features the most popular SlideShare
presentations currently making the rounds
on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, and Google+.
“And, if you want to go the extra mile, try
excerpting some content from the SlideShare
below it -- something like quotes or stats.
We often will do this on the blog: Let the
SlideShare bear the burden of storytelling
while the intro and conclusion are there
primarily to help bring in more readers.”
Strategy 2: Tee Up the Rest of Your Post
“This strategy is a riff off the first: You let the
SlideShare tell an engaging story on its own,
and then you use that engaging story as a
jumping off point for the rest of your post.
This means you aren’t duplicating content
from your SlideShare into the body copy of
your post, but rather using the SlideShare as
a storytelling medium and then finishing the
post in a text format.”
“This is a great way to repurpose existing
SlideShares you’ve already featured on your
blog in another post. The hard part (meaning
the design part) is already over, so you can
focus on writing an engaging blog post to
support the SlideShare.”

2. Rally the troops: You put
in a lot of time and effort
making your SlideShare
presentation amazing (...
right?). So, go on: share it
with your friends, family,
and coworkers and encourage them to
share it with their networks. Every little bit
of sharing helps!
3. Follow the headlines: In
section 1, we talked about
the benefits of repurposing
existing content for creating
SlideShare presentations.
However, from a buzz or virality standpoint,
creating a SlideShare that’s related to a
trending topic or news item has the potential
to perform better.
Just keep in mind that your goal should
be to contribute something relevant to the
conversation (not to plug your products/
services).
Landing your presentation in the “Trending
in Social Media” section can do wonders
for boosting your views, and -- in turn --
the amount of leads you generate. And
while there’s no magic bullet for earning a
coveted “Trending” spot, we do have some
suggestions:
1. Start a discussion:
Regardless of the social
network you’re sharing your
SlideShare presentation on,
spend some time developing
related questions and
discussion points. When posting, don’t just
write, “Hey, look at my presentation,” -- give
people a reason to look at your presentation.
Ask questions and encourage people to

SlideShare’s homepage has a lot of real
estate. So even if your presentation doesn’t
make the social trending section, it could
still earn a spot somewhere else and get a
significant boost.
At the end of the day, the SlideShare
homepage curation process isn’t an exact
science. The best way to improve your
chances? Create a beautifully designed
presentation that tells a compelling story.

You’ll be taken first to a “Summary” page,
where you can see the total views and
total actions (actions = likes, embeds,
& comments) for all of your SlideShare
presentations over the past month.
Use the black navigation bar in the top
right corner to change the time period. Your
options are 1 week, 1 month, 3 months, 6
months, 1 year, and all time.
measuring
performance
with analytics
Monitoring the performance of your
SlideShare presentations is a crucial --
but often overlooked -- part of SlideShare
marketing as a whole.
Ultimately, if you’re not looking at the data to
see which of your presentations are earning
the most views, driving the most engagement
(e.g., CTA clicks and downloads), or garnering
the most social shares, you won’t have any
insight into what’s working and what isn’t.
When you’re logged into your SlideShare
account, you can review this important data
by hovering over your logo in the top right
hand corner and selecting “Analytics” from
the dropdown.

If you want to get data on a specific
presentation, click the “uploads” button and
choose the presentation from the carousel.
To go back to seeing data for all of your
presentations combined, click on the folder/
upload icon.
Using these filters, you can identify potential
problems with your SlideShare marketing
strategy.
For example, you might notice that all of your
new SlideShare presentations experience a
sharp decline in views after the first week.
This could lead you to start experimenting
with staggering different promotional
activities to try to stretch the lifespans of
your presentations (e.g., week 1 you could
send an email, week 2 you could do a big
social push, and week 3 you could publish
a blog post).
Alternatively, you might notice that all of
your SlideShare presentations on topic A
get way more views and engagement than
presentations on topics B, C, or D. A natural
next step here would be to dedicate more
resources to creating presentations around
topic A.
Scroll down on the “Summary” page and
you’ll find a few more pieces of helpful
information, including presentation views
by country, a breakdown of specific
actions taken (including downloads), and
a breakdown of traffic sources (embed,
referral, search, slideshare.net, direct, &
social).

Assuming you put a lead form in front of the
.pdf version of your presentation, you can
calculate its view-to-contact conversion
rate by simply dividing downloads by views.
However, if you’ve also included lead forms
elsewhere in your presentation, a better
option may be to jump into your Lead
Dashboard, where you can pull the total
number of leads a presentation’s forms
captured. You could then divide that total
lead number by the number of views to
calculate the conversion rate.
For a closer look at the amount of views your
SlideShare presentations are generating,
jump over to the “Views” tab.
Here, you’ll be able to see presentation
views broken out by traffic sources and
geography. You can also generate top 5,
top 10, and top 20 lists of your biggest
traffic sources and the countries that
account for the biggest percentages of
your presentation’s views (see screenshot
on next page).

Under the “Actions” tab, you’ll find
a dashboard displaying clicks, likes,
comments, downloads, and email shares.
If you’re viewing data for all of your
presentations, you’ll see a chart with those
same metrics broken out for each individual
presentation you’ve published.
Alternatively, if you’re viewing data for one
specific presentation, you’ll see thumbnails
of SlideShare users who have recently
downloaded or liked that presentation, as
well as a Twitter stream showing all the times
people have tweeted your presentation.

To learn more about who is actually checking
out your presentations, you can navigate
to the “Viewers” tab. There you’ll find a list
of recent viewers, along with the times at
which they viewed your presentation, their
locations, and their referral sources.
Want to export your SlideShare data for
further analysis in Microsoft Excel? Head to
the “Export” tab, pick a time period from the
dropdown or enter a custom date, then hit
“Export CSV.”
The final tab in SlideShare’s analytics is the
“Social Sharing” tab. Want to gauge how
close you are to earning a trending spot
on SlideShare’s homepage? This is the
dashboard for you: it shows you the number
of LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter shares a
presentation has received, along with total
shares.
In addition to providing you with the cold,
hard numbers you need to justify the
business benefits of creating SlideShare
presentations, monitoring your SlideShare
analytics will arm you with new ideas and
insights that you can take back to your
brainstorms.
By continually identifying areas for
improvement, you can help ensure
that your next presentation -- and your
next promotional campaign around that
presentation -- will be better than the last.

The is where the science of SlideShare
marketing comes into play. You can use
SlideShare’s lead capture and analytics tools
to enhance and analyse your presentations,
so that you’re always learning and improving.
Hopefully, this guide has given you a good
overview of how you can bring the art and
science sides of SlideShare marketing
together so you can generate leads and help
your business grow.
FINAL THOUGHT
It’s important to remember that SlideShare
marketing is both an art and a science.
The art side of it is probably more obvious.
After all, creating a SlideShare presentation
requires that you craft a compelling story, and
then bring that story to life through the careful
selection and arrangement of typefaces,
colors, illustrations, photographs, and other
elements.
Once you publish that presentation, you may
be tempted to immediately move on to the
next presentation in your queue. And in a
week’s time, your earlier presentation might
become a distant memory.
If you’re trying to derive the most value out
of your SlideShare marketing, this is a poor
approach. Instead of treating presentations
like one-off projects, you need to start
treating them like campaigns, or ongoing
experiments.

THANKS FOR READING
www.theecommercepartnership.com

Step by Step Guide to Slideshare Marketing

Empfohlen

Empfohlen

Weitere ähnliche Inhalte

Kürzlich hochgeladen

Kürzlich hochgeladen (20)

Empfohlen

Empfohlen (20)

Step by Step Guide to Slideshare Marketing