As part of creating and promoting our own thought leadership in a visual format, SP Home Run has found SlideShare to be a very helpful channel for reaching readers that align with our ideal buyer personas in the data center industry and other mid-market and enterprise technology companies.
When it comes to inbound marketing and content marketing, about half of your effort should be invested in content creation. The other half of your resources should go toward content promotion.
After all, if a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it, did it really fall? If you write an amazing blog post and no one is there to read it, was the blog post really written?
So SlideShare can be a great way to get your content -- generally slide decks -- in front of a very large existing audience. By creating helpful educational content that answers your ideal prospects' questions, you build trust and gain trusted advisor status early on in the buyer's journey.
If you're not familiar with SlideShare, a division of LinkedIn, it's a social media channel that's one of the 200 most popular websites on the Internet -- putting it right up there in the same traffic range as household-name-websites like Etsy, Walmart, and Yelp.
To give you some inspiration for your own creations on SlideShare, here are six data center industry thought leaders creating remarkable SlideShare presentations:
- Build vs. Buy: 5 Key Steps to Overcoming Capital Constraints in the Data Center -- Excerpting from a more detailed executive report gated behind a landing page, CyrusOne's CMO Scott Brueggeman introduces five factors to consider when evaluating whether to build a data center or lease colocation space -- including capital costs, risk, staffing, financial impact, speed to market, and scalability.
- Containerized Power and Cooling Modules for Data Centers -- Published to SlideShare as a "Data Center Science Center" white paper from Schneider Electric, this presentation explains why prefabricated power and cooling modules are faster to deploy and how they provide cost savings compared to traditional infrastructure.
- Data Center Efficiency The Google Way -- While this SlideShare presentation definitely won't win any awards for formatting or design with its badly placed page breaks, you can, however, learn how Google approaches energy costs of data centers, PUE (power usage effectiveness), reducing power consumption, and greenhouse gas emissions.
- Data Center Tiers Explained -- A data center industry standard for categorizing overall capabilities and service levels, Data Cave provides a helpful overview of the four tiers (Tier 1, Tier 2, Tier 3, and Tier 4) and how each level relates to a measure to redundancy and uptime.
- Powering and Cooling the Evolving Data Center Infrastructure -- In this presentation from Gautham Gnanajothi of Frost & Sullivan, you'll learn why enterprises outsource data center services, how power scarcity limits growth, why colocation and managed hosting are fueling growth, and why energy efficiency innovation is on the front burner, advanced technology, and carbon emissions regulation.
- Waste Not, Want Not: The Inefficient Design of Today's Data Centers -- With four different forms of hidden inefficiency, Compass Datacenters' CEO and founder Chris Crosby explains why most data centers are inefficient, how design standards are a misnomer, what free cooling hours are all about, and why the solution requires a productized approach.
The Bottom Line
So if you've been on the sidelines about creating and promoting data center industry thought leadership and are inclined to build helpful PowerPoint presentations, be sure to get SlideShare as a social media channel near the top of your to-do list.
What kinds of helpful, educational content do you create to build trust among your ideal prospects? Have you built or repurposed any slide decks for SlideShare? Let us know what's working best for you in the comments below.
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