Slideshare didn’t want my business
source : Flickr – by Joriel “Joz” Jimenez
Some time ago, I started using Slideshare as an extra way of putting out content to buyers.
At first it was an experiment, but we must have done something right, because soon we had over 10.000 views on a number of presentations.
Because we passed the 10.000 views mark, we got a mail from Slideshare to try the PRO version of Slideshare, adding lots of interesting functionality. Yeah, nice !
Sneaky free offering
Interesting, as it seemed, I went on to their website and tried to activate the free month trial period.
I got quickly disappointed, as the offering required me to fill in my credit card details. The sneaky bit here is that although they would not debit my credit card, filling in all the details would mean an AUTOMATIC renewed monthly debit subscription to the PRO service. I also saw that at LinkedIn, but hey, aren’t they the same company?
Bummer !
Marketing take-away: if you are offering a free trial period, make sure the terms and conditions do not harm your brand by putting in sneaky or less appealing conditions. Your offering must remain attractive, even during the free trial period.
Resisting to have me as their customer
The number of views kept growing, so I decided to go for it. As our company is not set-up to work easily with on-line credit card payments, I hoped that Slideshare would be able to invoice me fort heir services.
Buying decisions are made in the cloud
This post is about todays buyers that inform themselves first through their “circle of trust” on the web, and create a short-list of vendors, before they approach them.
You must have noticed it yourself. How do you go about when you want to buy something? Chances are high that you talk to someone who has some experience with what you want to buy. But chances are much higher that you go on-line and that you build up your knowledge by visiting review sites, blogs, or contact some of your contacts on LinkedIn who might have some experience with what you intend to buy.
Oh no, not another post on content marketing
Before you think ‘oh no’, not yet another post about content marketing and inbound marketing, “tell me something I do not know”. Fair enough.
I want to share with you a little story on how I started realizing that indeed the buying process of professional has changed and that I had to change myself as a marketing professional.
