How Channel Marketing Managers Can Use SlideShare to Generate Leads

Channel marketing managers are usually tasked with two different lead generation challenges:

Identify potential MSPs or VARs that are interested in becoming channel partners

Attract end user leads that can be passed along to channel partners

Regardless of whether you focus on one or both of these demand generation needs, SlideShare can be a great social media channel for generating leads.

Even for relatively time-starved channel marketing managers, there are two kinds of low-hanging fruit for lead generation waiting for you on SlideShare:

Repurpose Under-Utilized PowerPoint Slide Decks

Do you have PowerPoint files sitting around collecting dust?

To turn these PowerPoint presentations into content assets that can drive very targeted visitors to your channel program’s website, or a related end-user demand generation hub, save each PowerPoint file as a PDF.

Take a few minutes to look at your persona-driven keyword research and write a compelling search optimized Title, Description, and set of tags for each SlideShare upload.

And one more very important tip: make sure to include a relevant call to action (CTA) on the final slide with a clickable link that drives to a relevant, targeted landing page.

If your destination URL is long and you wish to include a nice, short URL in the non-clickable Description, consider buying a dedicated domain name. For $10 to $12 per domain, per year, through a domain registrar like GoDaddy, you dramatically increase the chances of getting your SlideShare viewers to your intended landing page.

It’s worth noting too that SlideShare Pro accounts do allow you to embed a lead capture form directly within the slide deck. While some channel marketing managers may prefer this approach, from our standpoint we want the lead going directly into our HubSpot portal, with our standard form field questions, segmentation, workflows, lead intelligence, and CRM integration. The SlideShare Pro form capture is something we’ve considered, but have put off a few times as the API integration hasn’t gotten quite easy enough yet.

Develop New Slide Decks that Promote Blogging Thought Leadership

For channel managers with blogs that don’t have large reach or thousands of linking domains, it can be challenging for many of the targeted keywords to rank on page one of search results – no matter how awesome the content is.

So we typically divide our blogging budget up into two parts:

Writing blog posts

Promoting blog posts

Approached correctly, SlideShare can be an excellent tool for promoting the thought leadership in your blog posts. Here’s how we approach it.

Let’s say you have a fairly typical type of blog post that’s covering the Top 10 Hosted PBX Opportunities for Health Care MSPs. In that post, there are 10 main points that you’re trying to convey.

Each of those points, in a fairly large font size, will get its own slide. Add on a Title slide to the beginning of the slide deck. At the end of the slide deck, add on a targeted call to action (CTA) slide that recommends that readers visit a landing page to get a premium content offer.

Once you have a PowerPoint template built for this purpose, with a variation for each targeted CTA that matches up with your different blog post topics, these presentations can be built relatively quickly.

Then use the exact same Title, Description, and set of tags that your original blog post was trying to rank for in the metadata for the SlideShare upload.

Why? Because when you host your presentation on SlideShare, you piggyback off the tremendous inbound link authority that SlideShare has and your blogging thought leadership gets a second chance to make it to page one of search results.

In addition, with the SlideShare metadata setup correctly, many people that are viewing other related SlideShare presentations will in their sidebar and at the conclusion of the presentation that they’re viewing have your new presentation recommended to them.

And if your presentation gets enough traction, it may even get featured on the SlideShare category home page.

Tie SlideShare CTAs to Landing Pages and Measure Your Results

The key part of making this all work isn’t just streamlining the process and getting the metadata right.

It’s critical that you select a CTA for the final slide that is hyper-relevant to the presentation’s content. The more tightly-relevant the CTA is compared to the context of the core slides, the more likely it is that you’ll successfully drive the reader from SlideShare over to your landing page for a chance to convert your SlideShare reader into a lead at the top of your sales funnel.

By using the GoDaddy tracking domain strategy mentioned earlier, you should be able to track by CTA how many website visitors, leads, and ultimately clients are generated.

Or in the context of a channel marketing manager, how many potential channel partners reach the landing page, how many potential channel partners convert on the landing page, and how many ultimately become channel partners.

To tie end results back to the original traffic source that generated the website visitor, use closed-loop reporting.

In this post, we’ve looked at how channel marketing managers can use SlideShare to generate leads for both potential channel partners and end user leads to pass along to channel partners. We specifically looked at two use cases for

PowerPoint slide decks that are collecting dust on your hard drive or a shared folder

Blog posts that have a hard time reaching page one of search results on their own

Do you use SlideShare to generate leads? Do you feel that this social media platform can help channel marketers reach their lead generation goals? Let us know your thoughts in the Comments area below.

And to see where SlideShare presentations fit in with a more comprehensive end-to-end Inbound marketing solution, be sure to download your free copy of the IT Channel Inbound Marketing Planning Guide.  

Creative Commons Image Source: flickr Sylvain Kalache