Our ‘Why’: Our Purpose
Our ‘why’, or purpose, is to grow a business the traditional way — not by pressuring people to buy! buy! buy now!, but by building trust and rapport with people who choose to become clients.
Building a business this way gives purpose and meaning to a business owner. It is incredibly rewarding to know that a client buys your product or service because they want to, and not because they were told to or harrassed to.
Our role is to help you build your business this way, by doing the behind-the-scene things you know need doing, but require more time than you have.
Yes, this takes time, but it does reap benefits months and years later when happy clients willingly refer you to their friends, over and over!
How Do We Do This?
We do this with an old concept under a new name: content marketing.
Content marketing is a way of engaging with potential clients through storytelling and the sharing of useful and relevant information. Traditional marketing focuses on your business and products; content marketing focuses on your audience. Building a rapport with your audience develops trust and confidence, and your audience will often become happy and willing customers in return.
Content marketing can be done in any number and combination of ways. Social media is an obvious and first go-to for many, and can be a fast way to interact and develop an audience. This is very much a plus, but there can be downsides too. One is that you do not control the platform you are on, and you are beholden to that platform for your very existence on it. Another is that it is driven by ‘sound bites’ and feeds on short attention spans. It is hard to share deep and meaningful content in such an environment.
We prefer to concentrate on slower, time-honoured methods which build trust and rapport. This also has a downside of course (time), especially in this age where everything is needed yesterday. But these slower methods are the very things which make them our go-to method. Our careful and thoughtful research and writing can pay dividends for those with patience!
And of course there is no reason why the faster social media approach and the slower content marketing approach can’t be done together — in fact each has an advantage that complements the other’s disadvantage.
What Methods Do We Use?
We build trust and rapport with your clients via thoughtful research, which we condense into words high in information but very low in hype.
There are many options available in getting these words in front of purchasers, and include:
- blog posts
- case studies
- white papers
- articles in trade or other magazines
- your own newsletter
- your own magazine, catalogue or combination of these (a magalogue)
- support, tech and how-to manuals
- emails (but only to opt-in subscribers as we detest unsolicited mail)
Any of these options can be available on your own website, whether your existing one, or one we can develop and look after for you with our sister business Optimate Web Hosting.
Many of the above can be distributed online as PDFs, or even printed for offline distribution — we can help with that too if you like!