Two Bristol businesses have taken central roles in helping the Government-backed Digital Business Academy launch courses aimed at enabling UK SMEs improve their profile and trade online.
The courses are now live on the Digital Business Academy website – www.digitalbusinessacademyuk.com – designed by Bristol-based digital marketing consultancy Valuable Content.
Called How to Use Social Media for Business, it aims to demonstrate how to make the most of social media for business and features three examples of companies – including Bristol-based start-up dining app Wriggle and Clutton Cox Solicitors, a long-established law firm in Chipping Sodbury – that are using such skills successfully. 
Their course is one of three new additions to an original offering of eight compiled by Digital Business Academy. Timing of this second wave is particularly relevant as, according to recent research by the Department of Business Innovation and Skills (BIS), a quarter of the UK’s SME owners say they do not possess basic digital skills.
Head of the Digital Business Academy Richard Dennys, pictured, said: “Small business owners are aware of the value that having a good online presence and trading capability can provide, but it is another thing knowing how to go about getting that right.
“Our aim is to take some of that pain or confusion away by giving them tools through these courses, which can be viewed online at any time and stopped and re-viewed whenever it’s convenient.
“When it came to the social media courses we knew we had chosen the right team in the shape of Valuable Content and the course they have designed could not be better.
“The introduction video is really fun to watch and easy to understand and the organisations they have focused on perfectly demonstrates that getting a social media approach right can lead to significant business success.”
Spoke Island-based Valuable Content was founded in 2000 by Sonja Jefferson. In making the new course, Sonja and the firm’s creative director Sharon Tanton used principles they focus on for their own business and have also expanded on in their international best-selling book Valuable Content Marketing.
Sonja said: “It was a great privilege to have been picked to create this course but also we were very aware of the responsibility that we wanted to be able to make something that everyone could get involved with – and to help dispel any myth that you need to be a 25-year-old who has grown up using Twitter.
Pictured, from left: Sonja Jefferson and Sharon Tanton of Valuable Content
“To do this we were privileged to be able to work with three outstanding companies who are all very different and who have been successful in making social media an integral part of how they go about their day-to-day business lives.”
Clutton Cox Solicitors managing director Paul Hajek added: “We are a small firm in Chipping Sodbury and have been around for many years, so it could be surprising that we have been so successful through our online and social media channels.
“But I realised quite early on as I was using the internet for my own research to find things I needed how powerful a tool it would be. Our online communication now means we have a national profile and a brand people recognise.
“For us, it’s about knowing there are people out there online asking questions and that we can help them answer them – and if you’re not the one helping you can bet someone else will be.”
