Presentation Management is Better Content Management

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By Jonathan Winkel

Do you know whether your organization is using its best digital assets to increase conversions and drive sales? And even if you are, are relevant stakeholders—like members of the sales team, executives, and financiers—able to easily retrieve those assets? Or do they usually end up having to spend several minutes—or even longer—searching for the most impactful content?

If you’re not sure about the answers to these questions, chances are your presentation management strategy needs to be reassessed. If that’s the case, take comfort in the fact that you’re not alone.

Believe it or not, 57% of B2B customers say that salespeople aren’t prepared for their first meeting. If your sales team falls into this category, the good news is that—by making appropriate changes to your presentation management approach—you’ll be able to gain a competitive advantage over a majority of your competitors.

Getting the most out of your content starts with having a solid presentation management strategy. With the right system in place, you’ll quickly find out that presentation management is better content management.

Why Many Presentations Fail?

Businesses across all industries are pouring more and more dollars into content creation. This is because there’s a direct link between great content and conversions.

Take, for example, this chart from Content Marketing Institute:

Source: Content Marketing Institute: B2B Content Marketing

Unfortunately, for most large companies, presentations are an often-ignored creative, brand, and sales asset.

Lots of time and resources are invested in creating great content. But once assets are finalized, they tend to be stored in unorganized repositories on random drives and folders.

While new assets might be used for several weeks or months after they’re created, this content tends to collect digital dust over time as new assets are created and the team—particularly those who weren’t directly involved in the content creation process—forgets the original assets exist in the first place.

Without a presentation management strategy in place, organizations can expect their teams to:

Waste time searching for assets.

It’s no secret today’s employees are overworked. When companies rely on outdated content management methods, workers end up spending hours looking for relevant slides and other files. This wastes a ton of time—which frustrates employees and reduces productivity.

Source: Staples Business Advantage – 2016 Workplace Index

Present outdated content.

After spending lots of time looking for the latest slides—only for the search to be fruitless—employees will find the “next-best” asset to leverage during their presentations. This can result in employees giving outdated presentations—which don’t paint their organizations in the best light.

Experience lower ROI.

What’s the point of spending so much money on content when you end up not using it? Without a presentation management system, much of the content you spend money creating will go to waste—taking big bites out of your bottom line.

With a strong strategy and investment in a current presentation management solution, however, organizations can increase the likelihood their employees leverage their best assets while increasing productivity, ROI, and conversions.

How Presentation Management Increases Effectiveness

Presentations contain copy, images, graphics, charts, graphs, and other rich-media content that needs to be tracked, managed, and—most importantly—shared.

This is why presentation management is so important. With a modern presentation management system in place, it’s much easier for employees to:

Track assets.

Do you know how well certain assets are performing? Do you know with certainty which pieces of content your employees rely on the most—and which they haven’t used in several years? Presentation management provides your organization with detailed analytics that enables you to clearly identify the best-performing and most used pieces of content—as well as which assets haven’t been used in years and are just clogging up your servers. As a result, you’ll be able to delete outdated content and ensure your entire team is using up-to-date assets that have proven to convert. What’s more, you may even end up finding content you forget you had to begin with!

Manage content.

In today’s fast-paced digital world, content can become outdated in the blink of an eye. But in most cases, it’s never that Still, best-in-class organizations understand that their best assets need to be updated on a regular basis in order to retain their effectiveness. If your best assets are referencing an eight-year-old study, for example, those pieces of content are unlikely to be effective. To increase the impact of your sales team, you’ll have to update almost all content periodically. With a presentation management system in place, it becomes that much easier for relevant teams to know when certain pieces of strong content need to be updated. Thanks to commenting features, your assets can “talk back” to you, so to speak. Employees can have a dialogue around each important piece of content to ensure that the most relevant and impactful ideas shine.

Share assets.

Without presentation management, employees are more or less left on their own when it comes to finding the right assets. In these scenarios, it’s not uncommon for people to spend 20 or 30 minutes—or even longer—trying to track down what they’re looking for. With a robust presentation management system in place, however, not only is it easy for employees to find content on their own, they can easily share it with colleagues inside the organization and important folks outside the organization (e.g., a prospective buyer). This functionality saves a ton of time, making everyone’s job easier while giving prospects more data to base their decisions on.

Presentation management enables companies to turn lost files and slides into active and effective selling material. Dormant files that have been forgotten can once again be put in the spotlight.

That’s because files are visualized with context search and meta tags. This makes it much easier for users to identify that one awesome slide, white paper or video in a repository full of tens of thousands of them.

Since users spend less time finding content, they have more time to focus on other important aspects of their jobs—thereby increasing engagement and productivity.

Simply put, presentation management turns average companies into powerful ones. Companies with presentation management solutions always know where their best content is—and they can collaborate easily to continue updating and improving it.

Presentation management is content management. An effective presentation management system allows companies to create and manage more content with less confusion, frustration and miscommunication. You can track every version and make sure that it is current, compliant with company values, and ready to present. No longer will you struggle to find where each piece of content is or which piece of content is the newest version.

With the right presentation management solution in place, companies can ensure that their best assets are leveraged in each and every presentation—increasing conversions and strengthening their bottom lines while keeping their employees happy.

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This article originally appeared on the Shufflrr site. See more content from Shufflrr.

  Jonathan Winkel has lead transformative marketing efforts that take companies and brands from stagnant to digital-forward. As the creator of Objective Marketing, he drives the process and methodology behind marketing effectiveness. And as a Managing Partner at digital marketing agency SquareWheel Group, Jonathan leads all digital strategy and execution for client campaigns.

The views and opinions expressed in this blog are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of any other agency, organization, employer or company.