But you know the business doesn’t get closed here today: there are other stakeholders who need to give it the nod before the project gets the green light. You ask when you can get in front of those stakeholders so you can win them over. “Why not send me the slides?” your contact offers. “I’ve got 5 minutes at the management meeting next week and can run through your presentation then.”

Actually, you can think of lots of ‘why nots’ but none of them can be voiced without destroying the positivity surrounding the end of the meeting. Will your contact present with sufficient vigour? Will they connect your proposition with the business challenges cleanly? Do they know enough about how your solution stacks up against competitive offerings to handle likely objections? Just like that, the risk of the wheels coming off your sale can start to feel huge.

What do you do? To refuse to give over your slides to a staunch supporter feels churlish. You could offer to be there — at least in a supporting role — but if that’s not possible or appropriate, then there is another way: you could capture the sales pitch and deliver it as a complete package that your contact can share.

Capture the power of your pitch in video format
There are multiple tools out there that will let you turn your presentation into a video for just that purpose. Even if you have to cut it down to get your message across in the allotted time, doing this means that you retain full control of your value proposition and how it’s presented to those stakeholders, instead of trusting your contact to do your job for you. And don’t panic – it is possible to condense your proposal into 5 minutes without losing impact; we’ve done it with clients who needed to distil their presentation down to the core of what makes them special, and deliver it within a strict time limit, and it’s worked.

To successfully turn your presentation into a video, you’ll need to finely tune your script — just winging it in front of a mic won’t work, no matter how good you are — and use one of the aforementioned tools to layer that audio track over your slides (our favourite is Camtasia, but there are plenty out there). If you’ve got the time, you could even appear on the video in person so your audience can see who’s doing the talking.

Have you tried turning your presentations into videos? Do you think it works? Get in touch on Twitter, LinkedIn or in the comments section and let us know what you think.

Download our ebook:
‘Discover tips and tricks that will help you and your presenters conquer those nerves and get to grips with creating great video content’

The post Video presentations: for when you can’t be there in person appeared first on HN Marketing.

1: How long does it take you to create a presentation from scratch?
2: How many times does that presentation get used?

In my experience it can take a good few hours — if not days — to get the message right for a new presentation (and that’s before I’ve started fussing with the slideware). However, that presentation may only get one outing. Even if that outing is in front of a large group of people, it doesn’t feel like quite enough return on the time and effort I’ve invested to make the presentation in the first place.

So how can you get more value from a presentation? At HN we’ve got a few ideas to help you make your presentation go further.

1: Video it

If you can get the audio quality right and the environment is suitable, a sharp video can capture the emotion and punch of a live presentation for posterity. You can make the full version available or take the option a lot of our clients choose and edit the presentation down to hone in on the pithy messages you want to get across. The final video could go on to YouTube or reside on your website as a helpful resource for visitors.

See some examples of presentation videos we’ve created here.

2: Add a voice over

If you want more control over the audio, or to focus on the screen rather than the presenter, then recording a voice over is the perfect solution. You can also choose to break your presentation into bite-size segments, or prune the number of slides you show, to keep things brief. As with a video, the final article could end up on YouTube or on your website.

3: Create an infographic

If you’ve got awesome illustrations in your presentation, don’t relegate them to the sidelines — turn them into an infographic and let them shine. Not only are infographics a great way to communicate your key points succinctly, you can use components of them in social media to entice viewers to click through to the bigger picture. Here’s one we made earlier.

4: Craft an ebook

By combining elements from your slides, speaker notes and the transcript of your presentation, you can create a succinct ebook to get your message across. A thoughtful layout will pull in graphics from your presentation to create a real page-turner like this one.

5: Write some blogs and an opinion pieces

Use the thinking that went into your presentation as the grist for your blogging mill. It’s likely that more than one opinion is expressed in your presentation; pull each one out and write it up as a short piece. If you feel more comfortable, get a colleague to interview you to create a mini Q&A session. Who knows – you might find you’ve got a whole paper’s worth of content!

What do you think? Do you have any other ways of making your presentation go further? Let us know in the comments, on Twitter or on LinkedIn.

You can download the full infographic here

The post Five ways to make your presentation go further appeared first on HN Marketing.

The post Why your content strategy should be like child safety? appeared first on HN Marketing.

The ABCD of content reuse

Alternative formats

This is about presenting the same story or messaging in a different way: could you turn copy into a video, for example, or split a paper into a series of blogs? You could even take a blog and break it into a series of tweets. This way, you can exploit different media, content vehicles or channels — print and digital; words and pictures; in person and online. You could even provide for different languages through translation.

We recently wrote and published a blog that we’ve also made available as a cartoon , if you want to see what we’re on about. Remember to consider whether your audience will be reading on different devices (mobile, tablet, desktop, etc), or whether you can add to the user experience through interactivity, for instance.

Building on content

If you’ve addressed a topic for a certain purpose, why not add to what you’ve said for a different purpose? You could give further explanation and detail for those who need it. For example, you could turn the subject matter of a thought-leadership piece into a primer for a sales team.

You might find that one aspect could be expanded into a new piece in its own right. Or you might choose to create materials for customers at different stages of the B2B sales cycle by cutting up and adding to a piece of content.

Complementing

We can create material or tools that provide further substantiation or support for our messaging, such as customer testimony or an ROI calculator. This could also include a specific social media campaign that supports the release of your content or opinion pieces that create conversation and interest around the topic of your content.

Distributing wider

When we wrote about this in 2011, we talked about backing up your content with tweets, blogs and emails that point to your content. While that’s still true, there’s another way to extend the reach of your content – reposting it.

When you tweet about a piece of content, it probably stays on your audience’s stream for about 10 minutes before being replaced by newer tweets about world news and pictures of cats. In the worst case, your audience may miss it entirely when you post it.

Why not tweet about your content again at a later time? That way, you stand a better chance of your audience seeing your content, and indeed you may access an audience who would otherwise have missed your content entirely. The same goes for LinkedIn posts or emails.

You can also experiment with posting at different times to catch different audiences. You can research the best times online and some social scheduling sites provide reports for the best posting times for your audience.

Don’t let anyone tell you that it’s lazy to repurpose your content; getting it right can take some work, as we’ve said before. Once that’s been done, though, you’ll find that you’ve given your old content new legs, increasing its ROI and stretching your budget further than you might have believed possible.

This doesn’t just apply to written content; have a look at this blog for our tips on how to make your B2B video content go further too.

The post B2B content reuse: maximising the return on investment appeared first on HN Marketing.

1. Upload your video, tweet about it, and share it on Facebook, Google+ and LinkedIn.
2. Repeat those postings using a different strapline — retweeting your video multiple times keeps it at the top of your followers’ feeds without it feeling stale.
3. Embed your video in multiple posts. Whenever you tackle a similar subject, re-embed the video, or at least link back to it. This will improve the stickiness of your blog and will extend dwell time — the time people spend looking at your content.
4. Share your video via “reasons to talk” emails with your own contacts and prospects, and give your sales team a powerful conversation-starter.
5. Extend your video’s reach by storing it on your YouTube channel — repurposing content is another great way to extend its shelf life.
6. Re-edit, or even chop up, videos to make new content.
7. Refresh your video by adding new introductions, graphics, voiceovers, incidental music and even new calls to action.
8. Expand your target market by dubbing your content into another language, adding subtitles or including market-specific offers.
9. Use the videos as excerpts in other videos to show how far your brand has come, like the Fairy Liquid TV adverts which show the brand’s evolution through the ages.

If you would like to discuss your video marketing programme with us, just give us a call on +44 1628 622187.

Download our ebook:
‘Discover tips and tricks that will help you and your presenters conquer those nerves and get to grips with creating great video content’

The post Extending your video content’s lifespan appeared first on HN Marketing.

If it adds a view, shoot it

When the crew is on site they are there to capture a story and it’s crucial that they get time with the main sponsor. To provide context for the interview they can also shoot footage of your customers’ operation: the busy shop floor, the checkouts, the contact centre or perhaps show the vicinity and the outside of the premises as employees arrive for work. This B-roll is useful to provide a change of pace to the mini movie you want to create and can be a valuable cutaway to hide zooms and cover any of the presenter’s verbal or physical tics that are distracting.

While on site, it would also be helpful to get other beneficiaries of your solution in front of the camera. You could consider interviewing users, line-of-business managers, finance, technology or the CEO. Anyone and everyone who has an opinion on how your solution has impacted their lives and their way of working.

Assemble and repurpose

Back in the editing suite, this footage can be turned into several assets: different styles of deliverable for different channels, for different messages and to support different points on the buying cycle.

For example, we could create a collection of short talking-head clips that address key issues, each perhaps no more than a minute in length. Sales guys love them as a way of livening up their standard PowerPoint and tailoring the presentation to their prospect’s needs by incorporating customer testimony in a subtle way.

From the same shoot we could assemble the solution story talking about the benefits your customer has seen; we can also create the delivery story and how integration and implementation challenges were overcome; we can build the support story and show how, by working with you, your customer now has one less thing to worry about. If we put the footage together in another configuration, you have the cost saving story, or the one that tells how growth was supported, productivity was enhanced or how customer service was improved.

For early stages of the sales cycle we might want to keep it short with snippets to whet your prospects’ appetite and get the conversation started; further down the line we may need to provide more detailed or candid studies of your capabilities.

By digging for insight with your customers at the shoot and exploring how the deal was won and their opinion of the sales approach, we could even develop video footage to coach your sales teams and that’s not designed for customers’ eyes at all.

Many from one

From one day’s shoot you can create all these stories, sliced and diced for different purposes. They are available to be sprinkled across your website and social media channels, and to support conversations with your customers and prospects — be that for lead generation or thought leadership.

That’s a lot of impact from one day’s shoot.

Download our ebook:
‘Discover tips and tricks that will help you and your presenters conquer those nerves and get to grips with creating great video content’
 

The post Stretching your video budget further appeared first on HN Marketing.

And so to celebrate this great iconic brand here’s our take on content strategy IKEA-style in that familiar infographic format.

Here’s the code if you want to put this infographic on your website:

<a href=”https://hn-marketing.co.uk”><img src=”https://hn-marketing.co.uk/assets/contentstrategy.jpg” alt=”INFOGRAPHIC: If IKEA did content strategy…” title=”Content Strategy”/></a>

The post INFOGRAPHIC: If IKEA did content strategy… appeared first on HN Marketing.

• The prospect starts off in the ordinary world
• The call to adventure is an unsolved problem or unfulfilled desire
• There’s resistance to solving that problem, until…
• A mentor (your content) appears to help them proceed with the journey

Your prospect is Luke. You are Obi Wan

When you put your prospect in the position of the main hero (Luke Skywalker), and your content as the mentor who guides or assists the hero on their journey of transformation (Obi Wan), it’s extremely powerful. You allow people to identify themselves within the context of an enduring mythical structure that also makes a hero out of your brand.

Some of the most effective advertising campaigns have tapped into the power of the monomyth that Star Wars adopted, thanks to Joseph Campbell.

While content marketing doesn’t require multi-millions in production costs, it’s helpful to see examples of how the hero’s journey has been used in the past to grow revenue. My favourite is….

Apple’s “Here’s to the Crazy Ones”

Apple has done a phenomenal job of storytelling throughout the years. Their Think Different television ad (the “Crazy Ones” commercial) is one of their best. It says nothing about selling computers, or even computers themselves. But what is does do is connect with a potential Apple user, by comparing them to the great geniuses of modern history.

The call to adventure to change the world is front and center, amplified by a powerful sense of identification with cultural icons such as Albert Einstein, Mahatma Gandhi, and Martin Luther King, Jr., plus business leaders like Richard Branson and Ted Turner. It highlights the feelings that many people feel; the same feelings that these widely successful figures felt.

It leaves you feeling inspired, understood, and more connected to Apple computers.

The post Content marketing: the Jedi Master approach appeared first on HN Marketing.

This is the connection that we, as marketers, actively pursue by creating a brand story based on ‘the hero’s journey’.

The hero’s journey story structure has been around for a long as stories have been told.

The basic formula is:

• the hero embarks on a journey
• the hero encounters and deals with obstacles
• the hero is changed

We all hope that the hero wins at the end, and in brand stories, we want our product or service to be part of a positive change as the hero wins the day.

Who should be the hero of the story?

In a hero brand story, our hero can either be the customer or the brand. If the customer is positioned as the hero, the product or service is the helper—the sidekick or the mentor (the Obi-Wan Kenobi of the story)—that makes victory possible. If the brand is the hero, the product or service arrives and saves the day for the customer—who, at the end, identifies with, is inspired by or is influenced by the hero.

Who’s the hero in your stories? Let us know with a comment…

Make your content better by following the hero’s journey

Whether you decide to have the customer win by choosing your brand and becoming the hero, or you ride in and save the day, to take advantage of this connection with your customers, all you have to do is identify the number one obstacle your product or service helps your customer overcome.

Take that information and plug it into the simple formula of journey, obstacle, change, victory. Your brand story will position you in the customer’s hero journey, resulting in an emotional connection, potential conversion, and loyalty.

The post Content marketing storytelling: the hero’s journey appeared first on HN Marketing.

Sometimes, however, you need something more or different.

Gimme more

By more, we mean that a translation isn’t always enough. The text needs to be rewritten in the local language to convey the same subtleties of meaning as the original—and this is not a function of language but of messaging. To illustrate: a good quality proofer would be able to correct ambiguities and inconsistencies in your copy, and may rework whole paragraphs of the original (20–30% is typical) but they’re not able to originate copy with flair; and the same is true of a good translator.

A bilingual writer, on the other hand, can take a brief about the messaging and purpose of the piece to be created and then use the original English text as source to effectively create a new piece of copy that’s fit for purpose.

Vive la différence

By different, it could be that you don’t have and don’t need the copy in English at all—so why spend time and money creating an English version? Our mother-tongue writers work to the same exacting standards as our English-language team. They can interview in the local language to get all the information they need and write persuasive content that will convey your messaging with authority.

Zusammenarbeiten

We work as a team despite the geographic distances; you enjoy a single point of contact for your content development activity while we make sure any style preference or process changes are consistently applied across all languages. This is especially valuable for case study programmes and newswires where a uniformity of style or approach is required.

Language options

Alongside our English writing capabilities we also provide French, German, Spanish and Dutch origination. Get in touch to tell us more about what you need +44 1628 622187.

The post Sprechen Sie français? appeared first on HN Marketing.