Online Presentations Create Interest in your Business

You can't escape PowerPoint presentations in business these days, so you might as well embrace the technology to the benefit of your enterprise to help put you in front of more prospects. 

I see more online presentations (or webinars) than I do while sitting in a room as companies reach out to customers, partners and colleagues who are not close enough to be able to come to a presentation in person. Running webinars is an effective way to market your business because, like offline presentations you can speak with a number of individuals who have expressed interest in how your products or services can help them to solve a problem they have. 

However, you can never present live to everyone because of the challenges your prospects have with being in different time zones or their availability, for example. So, why not make use of your presentation to connect with people when it is convenient for them? 

There are some great online services out there which help you both create your presentation and make it available to the viewers. I use two of them, namely SlideShare and SlideRocket. SlideRocket is a superb online tool for creating eye-catching and impressive presentations. Some of its features include the ability to use 'creative commons' images from Flickr in your slideshow which gives you broad choice of images. 

SlideShare is another online presentations service onto which you can upload your slide decks for people to view. Both of these services have analytics tools so you can track how many people are viewing your slide shows over a month or more, for example. 

I put a presentation onto SlideShare a month ago and I have had 259 views of it since then. The viewers have been based in the US, UK, Thailand, Korea and Germany to name a few countries. 

So, the challenge is this: This is simply too much of a good opportunity to miss to get your business in front of prospective customers. You need to make sure your presentations are compelling so that viewers can easily understand what you offer and how they can get in touch with you. You have to treat each presentation as though you are showing them a short film or advertisement. A great guide for helping you to design your presentations so they are compelling is Cliff Atkinson's 'Beyond Bullet Points'. 

I have put my latest presentation which I designed using 'Beyond Bullet Point' principles in Microsoft PowerPoint 2010 and then uploaded to SlideRocket (below) and SlideShare. 

I now have two services quietly working away to help my business communicate with prospects who will get in touch if they like what they see.