Being valuable and visible is the most obvious part of marketing, or so you’d think. Marketing is moving away from being just a self-serving medium to something much more valuable to potential customers.

Technology is the major driver here. With greater access to more information than ever, the first step for all of us when buying anything is to research it.

Being valuable and visible means, when someone searches for the service or product you are there to help. Being there to help means making your information available to those who need it and on their terms. More than just help, we are educating our customers for their benefit. It’s important to have the right attitude here and to create this with the right intention.

We create education with the outcome of not teaching people to know as much as we do, but for the following reasons:

1. To create appreciation for our product or service
2. To prove the value of our product or service
3. To understand and buy into our particular approach
4. To provide valuable insights creating “aha” moments of clarity (not just sending information)
5. Making it worth sharing with people just like them (helping our ideal customers find more customers for us)

We start from the very bottom of what we know. From the beginning at the obvious stages as we should never underestimate what our audience do not actually know. It’s actually these stages that are the most valuable to a potential customer and these surprisingly are the stages that are the most overlooked. We assume our potential customers and customers know more than they actually do.

Keep it simple, keep it common-sense and in an 1,2,3 style approach. How do you start? Again keeping it simple is the key, simply:

1. Map out what it is you do from the beginning to the end
2. Highlight important steps and break them into stages
3. Title the stages as Beginner, Intermediate and Advanced

This is your process, your intellectual property of how you do what you do. Now you can start outlining the steps:

1. Introduction: Simple overview of what it is
2. Why its important: the reason you do it
3. Key steps involved: the main elements, why they’re in this order
4. The final outcome: what it should look like and why
5. How they can: a simple way for them to engage you to do this for them

What you’ll realise is exactly how much you do and the reasons you do them. This really assists in helping your customer truly understand your business and why you do things as well as understanding the value behind their investment with you.

Start them as articles, but you can make much more out of each one by reusing the information. You could for instance:

1. Make a set of simple slides outlining the article (add them into Slideshare)
2. Turn the slides into a simple movie (load them into YouTube)
3. Read the article and create a podcast or audio (load into iTunes)
4. Add a series of articles together turning them into a white paper or report (swap them for an email address)

Remember keep it simple. Remember Google loves video and multiple forms of content, this assists your web site rankings massively and in turn your traffic and increasing your leads. Now you are both valuable and visible!!

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