You’ve created a masterpiece! A magical collection of words and images that captures the essence of what you offer to your customers. It is clear, highlights the advantages of selecting you over your competition and positions you as the go-to solution in your market. It has influenced prospects to choose to do business with you. It resides in different formats ranging from a yellow note pad, to a slide deck, to sticky notes and many times to a whiteboard or flipchart from a very productive session with employees or customers.
Sadly, it is frequently found sitting idly on the sidelines of your sales and marketing efforts while your potential customers are searching high and low for what you provide.
7 ways to re-purpose your most effective customer messages.
Website – clearly this should be at the top of the list. Compare your current website to your masterpiece. Are they in sync? Are you conveying the same message on the front page of your site with the same power and persuasion? Does the impression from your website match the influential power of your best work? If not, now is a great time to get your website upgraded. There have been significant changes in the tech and the visual capabilities of websites. If it has not been upgraded in the last two years, you are overdue. While you are at it, look at your website on your smartphone. If almost one-half of all your website views are coming from a smartphone or tablet, you need to ensure that they experience your magnificence as easily from their phone as you do from their dual 27 inch LCD’s on their desk.
PowerPoint – You probably have a deck that contains much of this message. You probably also have a batch of other slides that show your building and a two page history of your company. Is it time to update your deck with a current version of your software (PowerPoint, Keynote, Haiku Deck, etc.) incorporating the current best practices from presentation thought leaders like Roger Courville and Nancy Duarte? Don’t forget to make sure that it displays effectively on a tablet or smartphone as well.
YouTube – Now that you have your key message in an updated format, convert it into a video format and share it on YouTube and other video platforms including Wistia and Vimeo. If you are new to this and are using at least PowerPoint 2010, you can save your presentation, animations and all, as a video with just two clicks right from the PowerPoint Menu. You can even record audio of someone talking to the content contained on the slides. Once you have this converted to video, upload it to your company YouTube channel that has been customized to reflect the message you want to convey and compliment your website and other online presence. Here is a Jump-Start Guide to creating your YouTube Channel if you need some help.
Slideshare – One of the most over-looked yet productive places to share your most powerful customer-facing information is on Slideshare. It is the world’s largest community for sharing presentations. It also supports videos; PDF’s and even recorded webinars. Do not underestimate the potential of having your information published for all to see on Slideshare. With an upgrade to a paid account, you can even collect leads and other information from those that view your information. It is money well spent in my experience, and you will seldom find your competitors in this space.
SoundCloud – Sometimes the power of the spoken word is more effective than a bunch of pretty pictures or video. This service will store and make available for search and replay any of your audio content. I have coaching clients that get more leads from SoundCloud than any other social media sites. Your experience will vary based on your industry and prospect pool, but the ability to listen to your message from their computer, smartphone or iPod, or even from iTunes can get your message delivered in completely new ways.
Webinars – If you have a presentation deck that is powerful, then get it online in the form of a webinar. Old stand-by’s like WebEx and GoToWebinar are still around, and new tech like UStream, LiveStream and Google Hangouts on Air are very effective at delivering your message and interacting with the viewers at the same time. If done correctly, you will be able to gain valuable information from each attendee to follow-up with and continue to develop a relationship long after the webinar event is complete. Don’t forget that a webinar is an efficient way to record your visual and audio presentation in a video format, for distribution on all the other platforms that are being shared here.
Social Media platforms – They all have a place in your distribution plans. Your LinkedIn Company page is an effective location to share one of more of these newly re-purposed messages. Include a link in your Twitter main page, and embed video, audio or slide presentations on our company Facebook Page.
It takes hard work to create that masterpiece we talked about at the beginning. Sometimes it can take years to get it just right. It will change as your company grows. Whatever form or format your current “masterpiece” is in, get it out there, convert it into all the other formats and spread the information to the world. That is what our new social-enabled world is all about. Jump in with both feet and share your results with the rest of us in the comments below.
Here are examples of using the information in this post and re-purposing key points for SlideShare and for YouTube
SlideShare Example
I originally published the original version of this post on the GetBase.com Blog which you can read here.
