Back to basics: what is valuable content and why I believe it’s key to marketing?
Sometimes we forget the journey we’ve come on and that not everyone has been on that journey with us. I’ve been working with students recently, and they’ve been asking excellent questions on my approach to marketing, and how I came to believe in it.
It’s always interesting to tell the story for a new audience, so here are some answers to their questions.
Why valuable content and how do you use it land your message and grow your business? Here goes…
Q: Why valuable content? Where did that come from?
There’s no standard path into a career in marketing. Some people come from journalism, others from communications, copywriting, or PR. My own journey started in an unexpected place: the world of sales.
At university, I studied Sociology, driven by a fascination with patterns in human behavior. After graduating, I began working in business development for consultancy firms, selling to corporate clients across Europe. It was here that I quickly noticed a fundamental truth: people tended to ignore flashy marketing materials and were resistant to hard sales pitches and cold calls.
So, I tried something different. Instead of pushing sales messages, I started sharing thoughtful, helpful content with prospects. For example, I’d send them articles written by my managing director and experts in the business—insightful ideas pieces that spoke directly to their challenges. To my surprise, this approach worked. These thought-provoking materials sparked conversations that led to meetings and trusted relationships that led to sales.
This was the early 1990s—long before blogs or social media existed. Reflecting on this experience, I realised I was applying what we now call content marketing. I became one of the UK’s early advocates for the idea that generously sharing knowledge and ideas could attract audiences and drive sales. This belief—engaging people with valuable content to build trust and foster relationships—has been the cornerstone of my work ever since.
In 1999, I founded Valuable Content to show businesses how to grow using this ‘value in advance’ approach to marketing. Over the years, shifts in buyer behaviour and advances in web technology have only amplified its relevance.
Today, while content marketing has gone mainstream, many organisations still struggle to define who they are, what they stand for and what they want to say. That’s where my work has evolved. Valuable content principles remain at the core of my approach, but now I help clients dig even deeper. I use research to uncover the core narrative that drives their work, connecting it to their brand and mission, helping them communicate and market in a way that’s meaningful and effective.
Business development remains a challenge for every organisation, but I believe that marketing with valuable content bridges the gap between how people like to buy—conducting their own research and leaning on trusted recommendations—and how businesses can sell smarter. By sharing content that demonstrates empathy, purpose, and usefulness, companies can spark relationships and build trust before any sales conversation even begins.
Over the years, I’ve learned a paradoxical truth about marketing and selling: the more you focus on helping and the less you "sell," the more you end up selling.
That’s why sharing your expertise through valuable content is, in my experience, the most effective way to attract, connect, and convert. Whether you run a small business or a global organisation, this approach helps you build trust, establish credibility, and ultimately drive growth.
Q: What is content marketing and how we use it to grow our business?
Content marketing is a very human way to do business. In essence, it’s about sharing your story online, sharing what you know and giving value to your audience.
It works for business because the content gets found by people who are looking for the knowledge you have and the help you provide. Get content marketing right, and selling becomes a lot easier. You’ll find the right clients coming to you, already feeling that they trust you, and wanting to work with you.
“Content marketing is a very human way to do business. In essence, it’s about telling your story.”
One of my clients told me someone found her and said ‘I’ve done all my research, and it’s you I want to work with.’ That’s content marketing in action. She’d never met that person before, and certainly never tried to sell them anything, yet all the useful content she was sharing online made her irresistible.
I love the way Doug Kessler put it in the foreword of our second book:
“Content marketing is very simple: use your expertise to help your prospects to do their jobs. Work hard to add value in every piece you produce. Be generous. And earn their attention by injecting passion, attitude and energy.”
Q: What is not content marketing?
It’s easier to answer ‘what is bad content marketing?’ because most things are not content marketing! So content marketing that doesn’t succeed usually shares some of characteristics.
Bad content marketing is…
Un-strategic. Without a core brand message and content strategy – and a clear goal in sight – you will just be creating content, and content alone won’t do the job of marketing.
Poor quality. Badly written or badly designed so people don’t want to read it or watch it.
Not created with a real person in mind. Good content marketing always answers a genuine question – it’s always customer focused, not inward looking.
Not created in the spirit of generosity. That desire to make a difference is key.
Q: How do I create valuable content? Give me some tips.
The best content is 80% effort in the planning, 20% in the creation. Here are some planning tips to make sure your content is customer-focused and valuable to your intended reader.
Plan before you write if you want your content to be valuable:
Why are you creating this content? What do you want it to do for your business?
Who is it for?
Why do they need it? How will it help them?
What’s the big idea? Key concept?
Main messages you want to land?
Who will you send it to once it’s finished? (NB: Think of a real person you want to send it to once it’s published. If you can’t think of someone, don’t create it!)
Remember, as one of my content marketing heroes David Meerman Scott wrote:
“Nobody cares about your products and services (except you). What people care about are themselves and solving their problems.”
For more on these planning questions see: Is this content valuable - a checklist.
Q: There are tens of thousands of articles and hours of content produced. How do I produce original content?
Good question. It is daunting, and it’s easy to think that everything’s been said before, so how can we possibly be original?
I think the answer is not to make originality your goal, but to make helpfulness your goal. Yes, pretty much every subject under the sun has been written about before, but that doesn’t stop people looking for answers to their challenges online. No one else has your outlook, and your experiences, and your knowledge. Make it your business to know your clients and their challenges better than anyone else, and create content that goes deep and specific into how to help them.
Helpful, deep and specific are all better things to aim for than ‘original.’ We don’t go online thinking ‘I want original’, we go online thinking ‘I want help!’
Q: What do you think is the biggest challenge for businesses when it comes to content marketing?
First, there’s the challenge around strategy and positioning. Is the business clear enough on its goals and targets to know what it wants content marketing to deliver? And is it clear on its perspective? Does it know what it wants to say?
Then there’s the challenge around understanding clients. For content marketing to work a business needs to invest in client research so they can create the right content.
Lastly, there’s the challenge of content creation. Okay, so we know what we want to create, and what our clients really want, now how are we going to write/design/shoot/edit/deliver it all?
Q: Mistakes that can ruin a content marketing strategy. (3 examples) How do we repair them?
Not having a strategy. Lack of strategy can lead to random acts of content that don’t get you the business results you need. Take time to research, agree what you want to say and write up your content marketing strategy.
Not grounding it in WHY. Not having a clear goal is a common mistake. What outcomes do you want from your content marketing activities? Is it to attract more of the right talent to join your organisation? Or to draw in the right clients? The more specific you can be the better.
Not grounding your strategy in real human needs. Your content can miss the mark if you don’t have a deep understanding of your customers’ world – what they think, feel and need. Investing in some research can transform the value of your content. Just 10 customer feedback interviews can make a huge difference to the quality of what you produce.
Q: How do we protect our information in the Fake News era?
It’s true, in this Fake News era it is harder than ever to get people to trust what they read and see online. I think the only thing we can do is to be honest, transparent, and approach our marketing with a genuine desire to help our audience / clients and make the world better for them. I still believe that, in the long term, genuine integrity and consistency do shine through.
Q: How do we measure the success of a content marketing strategy?
Measure progress towards your business goal. The ultimate purpose of creating and sharing valuable content is to build lots of great relationships with people who can help you build your business. This is what to measure. Track your effectiveness at each point of the journey – from followers to advocates.
Regular tracking and analysis of the data will help you learn and improve your content and marketing activities over time. There are plenty of useful tools out there to help you. You’ll find a growing number of intelligent social analytics tools that deliver insight reports, visuals, and graphs that provide a picture of what’s going on. These will help you make smart decisions about how to improve your content activity.
Pick a mixture of meaningful measures (subjective and objective, leading and lagging) and plot how you’re doing at each step in your monthly content planning meeting.
Q: How much money a company should invest in content marketing? On which criteria we build the budget?
I can’t put a figure on this as every business is different. For a one-man band or micro business, once you’ve got your website right and up and running, the ongoing cost is mainly in your time creating all the content you’ve planned. If you set aside half a day a week to write/record, and a short time each day for social media, you’d probably be fine.
For a bigger business, who wants to invest in more ‘wow’ content – videos, bigger guides, and SlideShares, events – elements that need external help to create, the costs are much higher. For a bigger business, I’d look at the bigger picture of what content marketing can do for you before I decided on the budget. The business benefits of telling your story clearly online, attracting a steady pipeline of the right clients, attracting candidates who want to work for you, creating a buzz around what you do – are huge.
Good content marketing can win you more of the right business, and it can save you money too – on recruitment fees, on staff retention, (creating content makes people happier in their work), on outdated sales techniques that don’t work anyway, on innovation and new product creation (you’ll really understand what your clients want, so can design your business to meet their needs). I’d take all that into account, and invest to build content marketing into every layer of the business.
Q: The best way to sell a product or a service is …
The best way to sell is to continually answer the questions your audience / customer is really asking. And to do this with heart.
Learn more about my approach
You can read my book: Valuable Content Marketing
The second edition of the book is ten years old next year. My co-author Sharon Tanton and I are revisiting the Valuable Content Marketing principles ten years on. Watch this space! Keep in touch - we’ll be publishing on this in 2025.