Guest Post: What’s the point of creating valuable content for your business?
What’s the point of creating valuable content for your business? It’s a simple question, but tough to answer because there are so many reasons:
To generate leads, to win more business, to engage people, to raise awareness of your brand, to help your customers.
All of these are true, but there’s a step before all those goals which is far easier to focus on, and measure – and if you keep it in mind, will make content creation feel more manageable too.
Better content, better conversations
The point of content is to start good conversations. That’s it, in a nutshell.
Business is powered by conversations. Every sales pitch, new project, staff interview or important next step in your business starts with a conversation. You want people to talk to you – to prompt those first ‘could you be the right person to help me?’ conversations, or to move somebody on through the buying process.
Content is great for that. It can frame a question or an idea, speak directly to people’s challenges, spark a connection, and throw it open for them to respond.
We’ve been reminded of this because of a talk we did earlier this week. Because of the content we delivered on the night, there’s been a big upswing in useful sales conversations. Coffees to discuss potential projects, new connections and chats on LinkedIn, meetings in the diary. Creating and sharing content fuels the conversations our business needs to thrive.
And when we have those sales conversations we find they are very different from a ‘come on then, what have you got to say’ type first meeting of old. Our content has already made a connection and done much of the job of selling for us. It’s a fast track to trust, and trust leads to sales.
Valuable content makes stuff happen!
Content -> conversations -> relationships -> sales
Measuring the number of good conversations you have on the back of each piece of content you create is a really useful gauge of its value.
What content will spark the right conversations for you?
Our Land of Content maps are great conversation starters, but what content would work best for you and your buyers? What conversation would you really love to be having? Map, guide, diagnostic or something else entirely – what content could you create to spark it?