There's an old saying in the content marketing business:

“Give a man a fish and he’ll eat for a day; teach him how to fish and he’ll find out fishing is harder than he thought it was and start buying your fish.”

Sharing your expertise is a successful marketing strategy that builds authority and good feeling, and ultimately converts to sales.

Knead to know

My local bakery runs bread-baking workshops, making it the perfect real-world metaphor to drive my point home. Far from teaching themselves out of business, they're building a passion for their products and a long-term relationship with their students.

Their classes raise standards and demonstrate first-hand the hard work, love and quality ingredients that go into making a proper good loaf. It's not as easy as the bakery makes it look, after all.

When these aspiring bakers are too busy to bake, where will they buy their bread? Certainly not the supermarket. They are now bread connoisseurs with a strong sense of loyalty to the local bakery.

Why does giving away your secrets boost conversion?

Telling people how to do what you do builds up your business in lots of ways:

It's a way to demonstrate your expertise, which is so much more effective than telling people you know what you're doing.
You show a generous and kind side to your business, which builds trust and good feeling. We all prefer to do business with people we like.
Just like the aspiring fishermen and bakers, your readers may well realise how much they don't know, and decide to leave the job to you, the expert.

If you hold back, for fear of give it all away, you could fail in a market where sharing your knowledge and showing you care is essential to getting your customers on side.

So, if you're looking for a way to kickstart your content marketing strategy, work out what advice your would-be customers need, then share, share, share!