Offering free downloadable content (content marketing) is an affordable, effective way to market your consulting practice.

As a consultant competing for the attention of potential clients, you need to find a way of showing your knowledge and skill. You also need to gain the trust of people who have visited your website and are trying to decide if your consulting style and method align with their needs and interests.

While there are many forms of marketing available to consultants, such as ads and press releases, most of them won’t help you increase your credibility or be seen as an expert in your field.

Content Marketing is a Great Way to Convert Prospects Into Customers
Creating free educational content, like PDF files, videos, and articles, is known as content marketing. It is one of the most effective types of marketing for businesses on a limited budget that need to establish themselves as reliable service providers.

As a consultant, you have a body of knowledge, skills, and experiences that you can use to educate others about issues related to their industries.
You can also explain how the consulting process works, and what clients can expect during a typical consulting session.

There is a variety of formats in which to offer your free educational content:
⦁ Website content
⦁ Articles
⦁ Blog posts
⦁ E-books
⦁ Videos
⦁ Special reports
⦁ Newsletter

You can offer some or all of these types of educational materials on your site, where people can read them online, or download and print them.

Once you have a library of valuable content that attracts visitors to your website, It’s time to decide which pieces of content provide the most valuable information to your target customers.

Your best content should now be repurposed into an e-book or special report that can be downloaded by potential clients, once they enter their contact information into a web form.

The downloadable premium content you offer is an effective way to build an email list of potential customers.
Once you have someone’s contact information, you can begin the process of creating and distributing e-mail content that is valuable to your potential clients.

This email marketing sequence offers both educational and promotional content, and aims to eventually convert prospects into paying customers and clients.

The combination of educational and marketing content via email will lead potential clients to see you as an authority on consulting-related topics.

As their confidence in your skills increases, they will become more receptive to your sales efforts. A few of these prospects will end up choosing you as their consultant.

Avoid Giving Away Too Much Information
Content marketing is more effective than placing promotional ads or sending sales brochures because potential clients feel they are getting something valuable from your content.

People don’t trust ads and other promotional materials as much.

Nevertheless, as a service provider, you need to be careful with the amount of information you provide. You only need to give away enough to gain people’s trust.

If you provide potential clients with detailed information on how to solve specific problems, they may use your e-book as a manual, and avoid hiring you.

Content Marketing Requires Work
As effective as it is, content marketing has a few disadvantages.

Producing articles, e-books, etc., is time consuming and requires decent writing skills. If you don’t have the time or desire to pursue these marketing activities, you may consider hiring a freelance copywriter to handle your business writing needs.

A good freelance writer can take your ideas and turn them into content that is informative and persuasive and works to convert prospects into long-term clients.

Your freelancer can also take existing content and turn it into other forms of marketing content, such as presentations and videos.

Consultants who implement content marketing experience considerable increases in website traffic without spending massive amounts of money on complicated marketing strategies.

Learn More About Content Marketing

If you want to learn how to effectively use free educational content to attract leads, please read the following books:

About the Author

Mark Bellini is a freelance copywriter and marketing consultant who focuses on creating marketing funnels (sequences) for small service-based businesses and internet marketers.

To learn why marketing funnels are the most recommended marketing strategy for small businesses, please visit www.writingconversions.com/downloads/

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