“How much of my knowledge should I give away?”
If your company is publishing content online, on blogs, email and as part of a sales funnel, this is probably something you worry about.
You and your team have worked for years to build up your processes, expertise and experience. But recently, it’s become expected that in order to market themselves online, companies regularly share their best advice and insight, and sometimes even tools, checklists and models they’ve developed.
The idea behind “content marketing” is that by being helpful to their audience, companies will build their authority, develop strong relationships with potential clients and attract real leads who understand how much value they offer. And done well, it works.
But that niggling question still remains: If all your best strategies and advice are available online, why should anyone buy from you? Should you hold some knowledge back?
Personally, I feel that most companies worry about this far too much.
First of all, the Internet gives every one of us access to (pretty much) the sum of human knowledge today. In reality, how much professional knowledge do you hold that your leads can’t discover alone, from someone else, with one Google search? How many of the tips you are worried about sharing are, in the truest sense, original?
It’s increasingly difficult to differentiate your company through knowledge alone.
Does this mean it’s not worth sharing? No. It doesn’t matter that someone else could give your audience this information – because they’re not getting it from anywhere else. They’re getting it from you.
As long as they need and appreciate what you’re sharing with them, it’s still your company they’ll be drawn to.
It also matters how you say it. If you can convey information in an exciting and unique way, you are still in a sense ‘making it yours’.
Second of all, you could probably write a whole book summarising every key piece of professional advice you have. And yet, most people would still need your help executing it.
There’s a difference between knowing something and being able to put it into practice. And that’s why, no matter how much advice you give away online, you will always still have clients. Even more than that, if your advice is valuable enough, you’ll have clients who don’t have the time, skills or ability to implement it queuing up at your door, so you can do it for them.
So don’t hold back because you are afraid that writing content will ruin your business. It won’t – quite the opposite.
