SlideShare — Content Marketing’s Best Friend?

Companies spend hours coming up with ideas for content, but not the same amount of time figuring out how to get other publishers to share that content on their sites. From my research, many content marketers start outreaching and just send URLs for people to check out, which is great to raise awareness. Yet when it comes to getting publishers to post and link to your content, it can really delay the process. Today, I will cover how we used SlideShare to promote a case study we completed about our lead validation process, how this platform helped us get links back to our site quicker, and how you can do the same for your site’s content assets.

In September, a colleague published a case study on the findings of Straight North’s lead validation process (click here). We used this case study for an outreach campaign and it was received pretty well from a number of publishers, but no one was linking to the case study. Publishers told us they liked the data and would share it with their readers, but that did not result in any links. We had to wait for them to write a post that included references to our data. Publishers also asked us to guest blog about our findings, but writing the same post over and over again made it tough for the writer.

To fix this problem, we decided to turn our case study into a slide presentation and upload it to SlideShare. The final product is below:

By using SlideShare, we were able to give prospective publishers something they could embed into their blog right now, to show off this information through an embed code that SlideShare generates. We would then offer to write an introduction paragraph so publishers did not have to invest much time or effort to post it on their sites.

Since switching to using this embeddable piece, the amount of publishers wanting to share this case study greatly increased — and the amount of time it takes for the post to go live has greatly decreased (a win–win in the world of a link builder/content marketer). In just the last few months, sites such as AMA, CMO Council and even other companies have published our study with only a week or so of lag time — all with links pointing back to our blog post and some of our landing pages.

If the goal behind the piece of content you are creating is to get others to post/talk about it on their websites, then SlideShare needs to be a part of your content creation plan. Whether you have a slide presentation, checklist or infographic that accompanies your content, it should be uploaded to SlideShare. That way, when you are promoting it to relevant sites, you can give that specific embed code to publishers — providing them with a quick and easy way to share what you created.

Let me know what you think about this process in the comments below.