Have you ever had a business owner or marketer tell you they only do one form of marketing – that they only use one channel? I’ve only heard this a few times in my career. And every time, after asking a few additional probing questions, it was clear – they don’t use just one channel. 
Last week, I had the pleasure of hearing one business owner’s story of only using one form of marketing and on just one channel. And to my surprise, she was telling the truth. Below is the story of how one business exclusively uses content marketing and Slideshare.net to drive 100 percent of its business leads.
Visual content spawns a company
Honolulu Hawaii’s Empowered Presentations was spawned after Yancey Unequivocally, co-founder and president, convinced her husband and fellow co-founder, Cory Jim, to submit a deck to the World’s Best Presentation Contest on Slideshare.net in 2010. Their presentation, Smoke, a Convenient Truth, was awarded the top prize and has been viewed over 600,000 times to date.
SMOKE – The Convenient Truth [1st place Worlds Best Presentation Contest] #smoking #statistics from Empowered Presentations, Presentation Design Firm – Honolulu, HI
Visual content marketing
Because their presentation decks are so amazing, well designed, carefully planned and deliver an impactful message, they get virally shared on Slideshare.net and across many other social networks. They spend 60 to 90 hours on one presentation alone. See for yourself below, or check out their online portfolio.
10 Business Lessons from the Battlefield [#BUSINESS #TIPS #BATTLEFIELD] from Empowered Presentations, Presentation Design Firm – Honolulu, HI
Driving leads with Slideshare.net
Slideshare.net has a reported 60 million monthly visitors and is listed as one of the 200 most visited websites in the world. Users have the ability to sign up for three different paid subscriptions that allow for lead capture, advanced analytics and branding. The lead capture service is called LeadShare and it allows users to collect leads through their presentations, documents and videos.
Some of the features include campaign creation and editing, basic lead form options, geographic targeting and custom questions. Depending on the plan purchased there may be a limit to the number of leads a user can collect.
Empowered Presentations’ lead generation
After a lengthy conversation, Yancey told me that the 10 Business Lessons from the Battlefield presentation above drove over 100 leads that day. It was uploaded several days earlier, which means it likely drove many more than that. The fact that we were talking meant that I was now a lead created from the very same presentation.
Yancey went on to tell me that creating and publishing slide presentations to Slideshare.net was the company’s only form of marketing, and that it’s helped the company sustain growth. That’s not hard to believe, either, because I was already convinced to do business with Empowered Presentations after flipping through their portfolio. That’s the power of great content marketing.
The moral of the story
Content marketing can be deployed in many forms. However, it’s not the form it takes, but rather the impression it leaves on the content consumer that makes content a successful marketing tool. You may be familiar with how Marcus Sheridan used content in the form of blog posts to help put his company back on an upward growth trajectory. The above is a similar story of business success using content marketing.
It’s likely that Yancey and Cory’s story won’t be told at this year’s Content Marketing World – that’s one of the reasons I wrote this post. However, there’s no doubt that their amazing content marketing story should be told—and if enough people hear it, perhaps we’ll see them on stage at next year’s Content Marketing World. I’d just hate to be the speaker who presents after them. . .