Click here to download the Content Marketing Planner mentioned before the start of the episode!

AUDIENCE QUESTION:

“We presented a seminar at MODEX using powerpoint. We received a lot of requests to send the deck to both attendees and those who missed it. I didn’t just want to post the deck because it doesn’t contain the narrative that our speaker gave, it doesn’t tell a story besides being sequential…I think it’d be great if you wrote up a guide on how to turn a powerpoint presentation into a lead generating eBook!

– Maggie

Great question, Maggie! Repurposing content is the bread and butter of marketing, and presentations often provide more material than originally expected! That said, here are a few top pointers about trying to make eBooks or other deliverables out of your resources.

1. WHEN POSSIBLE, START WITH THE END IN MIND

For the particular presentation that your team-member gave, this step is a tiny bit irrelevant. But if you know that he/she is going to probably give that presentation again, then you’re still in luck!

Whenever you suspect that a certain piece of information will be valuable to your prospects, or if you suspect that someone on your team will have to repeat the same message many times, then preparing beforehand to turn it into a deliverable will indeed be a valuable content marketing tactic.

2. RECORD THE PRESENTATION

While you specifically asked about an eBook deliverable, the honest truth is that the best way to collect the content from the presentation (particularly the remarks that were spoken but not on the slides) is by filming the whole thing.

Video can provide multiple deliverables.

Whether it’s live during the event or in a professional recording session, it’s the ideal way to capture the content. Whether you want to have visual webinars/tutorials, audio for podcasts, captions that can become transcripts, or still images of the speaker…you can get them all with video, and they all might be valuable to your prospects.

Then when you play the video for your viewers, you can alternate between the speaker and the slides themselves: so they get the best of both worlds.

3. DIVIDE IT INTO BITE-SIZED CHUNKS

If you think the presentation lends itself to multiple smaller sections (especially if it’s more than five minutes long), then create divisions within it.

Instead of one really long deliverable, create multiple short, specialized deliverables.

Turn it into a series. Why not? Even if you’re still going with an eBook instead of a blog, you can provide different sections or chapters as their own item.

4. CHOOSE YOUR WEAPON– ER, DELIVERABLE

If you think your prospects will be dead-set on an eBook, then you can use programs like Powerpoint or Adobe Illustrator to create a PDF with the slide deck. Either program will provide opportunities for you to rearrange the content, update it, or add relevant information from the video transcript.

But truthfully, it’s far more likely that video will be your audience’s preferred medium.

5. TRACK IT, TRACK IT, TRACK IT

Whatever you decide to create – be it a downloadable PDF or an online video series – make sure you can tell who’s actually using it.

Don’t go to all the trouble of providing a valuable, educative resource and then drop the ball on measuring its success rate.

Use gates or UTM codes or sophisticated analytics platforms to plan out a trackable delivery so that you can count the clicks, see who’s really interested, and perhaps even spot if there are any parts of the content that they’re really focused on.

From there, how you handle that feedback will affect what you do next. But since it sounds like you’re already doing a great job of listening and responding to customer feedback…we have a feeling you’re going to do just fine!

 

Thanks for reading. Don’t forget to subscribe to the IndustrialSage newsletter to get each of the weekly episodes sent directly to your inbox; or subscribe to the podcast on iTunes so you can listen on the go! If there’s a particular topic that you’d like the sages to talk about, or if you have a particular a challenge that you’d like them to take a crack at, send them an email. If your topic gets picked for a future episode, you’ll win a free IndustrialSage t-shirt!