Serving and selling: two great tastes that taste great together

The days of blatantly self-serving, even false, marketing are slipping away (I can hear my professional services firms clients cheering!). But there's still a lot of debate happening out there about what's taken its place, what works now, how to market a business in a way that feels good and gets results.

It's not really all that complicated.

Storytelling. Personality. Authenticity. Information.

It's about educating your market. Being their guide. Helping them find out what they need to know (or maybe showing them what they didn't even know that they didn't know). For service-based businesses, this is like the Holy Grail. Your marketing can be an extension of providing high-integrity, high-quality service. It can be valuable, informative-- even welcomed. And when that happens, as it does when you develop good content, the gap between marketing and the rest of the business gets pretty small.

Here are a few examples plucked from my client files of when content-based marketing makes great sense:

• When you're selling complex services or products
• When you're selling professional expertise
• When your clients have a learning curve
• When traditional marketing isn't for you, but know you still need to market your business
• When you want your marketing efforts to sync up better with your business development efforts
• When you want to take advantage of content-rich social media marketing channels
• When you're a non-profit organization with a cause to promote
• When you want to build relationships and reputation
• When you want to differentiate your business in a competitive marketplace
• When your PR program involves giving editors what they want (interesting stories) instead of fluff
• When you want to start a larger conversation

Most businesses can find a place for content development within their overall marketing strategy. For some, it just may be the foundation on which you build everything else.

How does your marketing serve your customer?