Jay Baer, one of the world’s most inspirational speakers on marketing and customer service, wrote the book Youtility. His book is a New York Times Best Seller. In it, Baer teaches business owners how to modify their sales model. It’s an important element needed to keep up with the changing times, particularly in the digital space.
Traditional Marketing Methods
In the past, traditional brand awareness efforts like television and radio advertising were enough to bring in business. But as Baer points out in Youtility, with new technology, business owners must shift their focus online. They must concentrate on providing value to customers in order to keep them coming back. In a world of information overload, the way to build customers for life is by providing information that is valuable to the customer. Content marketing achieves this goal.
Baer provides this example: in 1977, the top-rated show had a 31.5% rating. In 2014 the top-rated show on TV has a rating of 6.9%. This data helps point to the fact that there are more options than ever before when it comes to consuming content. Translation: there’s more competition than ever before.
Consider this: if you are advertising on Facebook, your company is competing for attention against your client’s closests friends and family members. Youtity provides guidance to business owners on how to gain attention in this incredibly competitive space.
Today’s Digital Marketing Methods
One of the main points that Baer focuses on in Youtility is as follows. Today, companies spend too much time focusing on how to make their products exciting. Everyone wants to go “viral” but in actuality, what smart marketers should focus on is how they can help the customer. By focusing on help, not hype, and providing value, company’s have the unique opportunity to create a customer for life.
This is how Baer came up with the concept of Youtility. The goal is to get companies to create marketing so useful that clients are willing to pay for it.
There are three ways in which companies can embrace the Youtility principle. Baer goes into detail within the book. The first way is through Self Service or providing answers to the questions that people ask. Radical Transparency, the second concept, is being open and transparent about the operations of your company. When companies are transparent, they build trust. Real-Time Relevance, the third concept, provides information that is relevant to the consumer the moment they are interested in. For example, a sports medicine hospital provided an app to alert coaches when lightning was near. This alert gave them time to clear the fields and keep people safe. While an app isn’t related to the medical field, it’s highly relevant to their customer base. When the app launched, people downloaded it more than 400,000 times.
If you are a small business owner, sales professional or entrepreneur who’s looking to take their company to the next level, then Youtility is the perfect book. It will provide you with information to take your content marketing (and ultimately, sales) to the next level.
Other Concepts Explained in Youtility
Another concept discussed in Youtility is top of mind awareness. Top of mind awareness is the idea that you must have a continuous message flow from your business to the masses so that when a consumer is ready to make a purchase, your brand is the first one that they think of. However, this type of marketing can be very costly. Who can afford to spend the money needed to have a presence on costly TV stations all the time?
Only really large companies can even afford to implement this strategy, which is why Baer does not recommend this approach in his book, Youtility.
Of course, there are small companies that attempt to gain top of mind awareness. However, as Baer illustrates in his book, Youtility, it’s not effective. One example is when wanna-be rappers have a twitter account and just tweet the same thing over and over again. BUY MY BEATS! BUY MY BEATS! BUY MY BEATS!
The idea is this: a tweet only is relevant for a few seconds. However, people will see the message if it’s shared over and over again. So, tweets go out on a consistent basis.
The truth of the matter is whether you’re a large company spending your money on top of mind awareness or a small company spending all your time on top of mind awareness, it’s not an effective digital marketing strategy in the long run.
The Yellow Pages Example
Frame of Mind Awareness is another marketing term described in the book, Youtility. This marketing strategy is based on the idea that if salespeople step in at the precise moment a consumer is about to make a purchase, then their sales will skyrocket. Basically, if you’re in the right place at the right time, you’ll get the business since your company is “seen”.
An example that Baer uses to illustrate this point is the phone book. As the legend goes, one phone book company used yellow paper instead of white paper. Doing this made their phone book stand out among the masses. People noticed the yellow book pages. Therefore, people selected it over other phone books. There are numerous examples of marketing hype like this. Ultimately, readers will find in the pages of Youtility that these are not long term answers to success.
Instead of focusing on a flash-in-the-pan, magic solution, Youtility suggests that building credibility and trust among your audience. These methods will bring more business in the long run. Combining trust with the other two methods, Self Service and Real-Time Relevance will achieve the best results. This goes for both large and small companies.
Why Read Youtility
Do yourself and your customers a favor. Go to amazon.com and buy Youtility today. Lucky for you, it’s available in Kindle, hardcover and in audiobook form. There’s really no excuse for you to miss out on the amazing content the author of this book has created.
Read the reviews on Amazon if you don’t believe me. There are more than 150 reviews for the book Youtility. 94% of the reviews for the book are 4 and 5-star reviews. There were only 2 people who left 1-star reviews. Jaybird claims that his 11-year-old son is better at marketing. If that is true, I would like to read and review his son’s marketing book.
