We’ve come a long way from crowded slides, clip art, and bullet points. Presentations have become more like little standalone masterpieces, especially when the content accommodates this philosophy. What do we mean by “standalone”?
One of our best examples of work in the Ethos3 portfolio is a marketing piece we created for a SlideShare blog post, called The Art of Simplicity. The assets we designed served many functions. The first was to create a beautiful presentation on SlideShare which could be embedded as a whole piece. The second was to pull individual slides, or standalone slides, as quotes to support the content of a blog post.
Before we dive into the secrets of “how” we accomplished design success with this project, check out the presentation in its entirety below:
Gorgeous. So how can you harness this same design strategy for yourself, and create multiple assets for your content marketing efforts?
Start with a standalone concept
In this particular piece, we used a series of quotes that aligned with the overall concept of simplicity. Each quote acted as a proof point for the main idea, which is quickly introduced in the SlideShare presentation to give it context. Only four slides out of sixteen are unable to stand alone as individual images. The rest can be used anywhere, without explanation. If you want to capture this same tactic, consider using a series of standalone quotes, facts, phrases, or company statements that can make up the bulk of your deck.
Modern, clean design
The purpose of our “Simplicity” post and deck was to instill the concept of design minimalism. It’s really an inspirational piece, all things considered. The reason it works so well is because the proof is in the visuals. You don’t need words to explain how great clean lines, flat illustration, and blocks of color look. Here are few examples of what we mean.
Additional context with a blog post
For added SEO juice and more context to the presentation, the blog post that correlates with the SlideShare deck does a tremendous job of giving each quote some applicable tips. It’s filled with search-friendly advice that enriches the existing content. When you develop a presentation for content marketing efforts, you should always consider how a blog post (or two!) could give the finished product more value online. It’s easy to make your content marketing piece go farther if each slide can be pulled out and featured separately. If we wanted to, we could have written an entire post about each quote and used the slide as a header image.
Now that’s what we call flexibility.
Want to learn how to create and utilize a presentation for your own internal marketing efforts? Catch a little inspiration by reading some of these other great posts:
The Complete Guide to Content Marketing With Presentations
