Pictured: Sonja and Sharon of Valuable Content
Bristol-based digital marketing consultancy Valuable Content has been selected by Government-backed Tech City UK to create an online training course to help UK companies and employees do more business online.
Valuable Content, launched by Sonja Jefferson and Sharon Tanton 15 years ago, will produce the 10th Digital Business Academy course, focusing on the best way for businesses to use the latest social media platforms.
The deal was announced at a high-profile Digital Business Academy event in London on Wednesday.
The Digital Business Academy, launched in November last year in partnership with University College London (UCL), offers an easy way of providing high-quality learning content, not usually available outside a university, so that as many people as possible can access it. The courses offered are totally free of charge to users in the UK and open to everyone.
Sonja and Sharon set up Valuable Content, based at Spike Island, to provide a new way of helping entrepreneurs and marketers in small businesses learn how to use the web to attract the work they want.
They are internationally renowned for their market-leading book Valuable Content Marketing: How to Make Quality Content the Key to Your Business Success.
Sharon said: “This is a very exciting opportunity for us as our entire ethos is aimed at helping business owners understand the opportunity the digital world can provide – and then giving them the tools to help their businesses fly.
“We are very proud to be representing Bristol in the Digital Business Academy as we believe the city and wider region is at the absolute center of digital creativity and online thinking and look forward to bringing that buzz to the course.”
Originally offering eight specialist, free online business courses, the Digital Business Academy has received more than 12,000 registrations since launch. This has now led to an expansion of the courses available. New courses are set to open in September 2015, including that to be created by the Valuable Content team.
Head of Digital Business Academy and Skills, Richard Dennys, said: “Once businesses embrace and understand how to be a part of the growing digital economy it can be a step change in their business.
“Social media is a huge part of that, but it is often perceived by time-poor business owners as an ‘add on’ – something people think they ‘have to’ do rather than want to.
“We were looking for an organisation that could cut through these ideas and provide real-world savvy and flair when creating the course, while bringing practical business tools to the table.
“Valuable Content is all that and more – we are very excited to start working with them on building a course fit for today’s entrepreneurs. Also coming from Bristol, one of the Europe’s most digitally aware cities, means we can leverage the expertise of the Bristol cluster and allow us to feed that back into the Digital Business Academy learning community.”
Valuable Content’s course will sit alongside other specialist online courses, ranging from building brands to running online campaigns, developing digital products to raising finance.
Other course providers include UCL, Founder Centric and the University of Cambridge’s Judge Business School.
