Slideshare: A key tool for B2B content marketing

Slideshare: a part of the hub-and-spoke approach

I think many readers will be familiar with Slideshare, a business-to-business (mostly) presentation sharing website which enables organisations to upload their PowerPoint presentations (or Mac Keynote) and Word documents and share them with the world. It’s an excellent way to showcase your thought leadership ideas as part of a content marketing strategy.

As an example, you may have seen Dave Chaffey's Slideshare, its power is shown because some presentations like this one on trends for 2012 will reach several times more people through Slideshare's platform than the embeds on Smart Insights.

This happens because Slideshare facilitates sharing within it's platform and through the social networks.

Elqoua and Hubspot are both great examples of leveraging Slideshare to its best potential, they leverage the paid service to turn Slideshare into a well branded repository of content that tells the brand story, whilst at the same time capturing leads.

Inbound marketing paradise

If you're serious about inbound (or content) marketing, and you're in the B2B space then you won't need me to tell you about the importance of easily digestible content in the hands of the right people (influencers or leads). That's where Slideshare can help. It's easy to see how Slideshare can be a part of a hub-and-spoke approach to marketing, or the digital marketing radar as we describe it. A rich repository of content relating to your market and opportunity for your content to play a role in that eco-system. Slideshare has some pretty slick features. The benefits for your brand and content marketing?

• A powerful branded outpost since Slideshare has serious reach, within Google and LinkedIn - hugely important for B2B marketers. The LinkedIn integration and synching is a serious advantage.
• It has heavy usage so you're findable from within as people browse side-ways based on content topics
• Slideshare has rich commenting features for natural, social interactions around the subject matter
• You become infinitely more findable (from both search, LinkedIn and from within Slideshare)
• Your exposure is married with top-drawer social sharing facilities - your content 'has wings'
• The in-built lead capture facility offers a new way to garner low-intent leads
• Your content in one place - upload it once and the use the embed code to plant your Slideshare content wherever you wish, on your site, in blog posts, for example. Like Flickr and YouTube
• Ability to embed your Slideshare content on external sites (pulling the feed from Slideshare)
• Public or private option on your content
• Basic analytics

Have you used Slideshare or similar platform to its full potential - any insight to share? Are the paid versions worthwhile. Here's the Eloqua example which uses the enhanced version: