Marketing Monday – Youtility for Small Business to Help Customers and Grow!

I wanted to share some tips and info that can apply to any small business owners on content marketing from a great book. I have read this book several times because of the quality of ideas and strategies by leading Content Marketing and Social Marketing Expert Jay Baer…

Youtility, Why Smart Marketing is about Help not Hype
By Jay Baer @jaybaer

“Consumers expect to find answers on the Internet now, and companies that can best provide that information garner trust and sales and loyalty. Success flows to organizations that inform, not organizations that promote.”

“What if you decided to inform, rather than promote? You know that expression ‘If you give a man a fish, you feed him for a day; if you teach a man to fish, you feed him for a lifetime’? Well, the same is true for marketing: if you sell something, you make a customer today; if you help someone, you make a customer for life.”

“I call this Youtility. Not ‘utility,’ because a utility is a faceless commodity. Youtility is marketing upside down. Instead of marketing that’s needed by companies, youtility is marketing that’s wanted by customers. Youtility is massively useful information, provided for free, that creates long-term trust and kinship between your company and your customers.”

“The difference between helping and selling is just two letters. Those two letters now make all the difference.”

“The way customers gather information about companies and make purchase decisions has changed. Consumers’ time and attention has never been more scarce, and their suspicion of lazy interruption marketing has never been more acute. In this climate, utility is not an option; it’s necessary.”

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“Youtility for #smallbusiness content marketing to #MakeBusinessBloom on Marketing Monday…http://bit.ly/mmmyoutility “

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3 Different Types of Marketing Strategy
Top of Mind – (advertising barrages) may still work for big budgets but not small business but is less effective due to a fractured media landscape, not to mention that consumers don’t trust businesses.
Frame of Mind awareness – (reach consumers when looking to buy – active shopper mode) Inbound Marketing strategy has its merits and continues to be a valuable strategy but should be combined with other strategies due to the declining role of search engines in the discovery process.
Friend of Mine Awareness – newest form of marketing “…predicated on the reality that companies are competing against real people for the attention of other real people. ” Success relies on adding real value to your new ‘Friends’ (prospects and clients).

The New Paradigm of Youtility
One way to succeed in the ‘invitation avalanche’ of social media where everyone is asking for likes, follows, shares, +1s, etc is to have amazing content that is so much more interesting, wacky, irreverent, or timely than everyone else it can’t help but to be buzzworthy and even go viral. If you are like most small business owners you don’t have a creative team that works full time on social media (You likely have a salespeople or two that needs to spend more time focusing on closing the sale not tweeting a viral video they added to YouTube.)

A better strategy is to break through the noise, stop trying to be ‘amazing’ and be useful..add value or ‘Youtlility’ to your future clients. By adding value to potential consumers on a regular basis you become one of their go to resources for information and stay in the forefront of their minds. Either you can convince them of the value of your product before they would have decided to buy or you are the first place they go when their needs require your products or services.

3 Facets of Youtility
“Self-Serve Information: Give people the opportunity to inform themselves how and when they wish…”
“Radical Transparency: Providing answers to nearly every question a customer could conceivably ask – before they think to ask it.”
“Real-time Relevancy: Using geolocation and other specific circumstances to become massively useful at particular moments in the life of the customer, and then fading into the background until the next opportunity to help arises.”

Self-Serve Information
The shift in consumer dynamics continues to be away from face-to-face, so much so that very few people even complete a quick web form because they don’t want to be called even if they have a genuine interest in the product, they will wait to do so until they just want to confirm their decision to purchase the product or service.

The salesperson used to be the first step in the sales process, now the salesperson typically will come into play only after the consumer is well into the process (some studies say 60%+) so they have already eliminated many providers and have a few finalists based on their own research. The salesperson today does about 90% marketing and 10% closing the sale.

Do you have to create all the unique content in order to make inroads with new prospects? Not necessarily, if you can provide access to the sources of information and be viewed as adding value to the decision making process, you should at least be in the mix of those being considered for their business!

Radical Transparency
Create customers by answering questions they have can be very persuasive.
Provide extra ordinarily detail information to your prospective customers. (The days of a short teaser with all the important details coming after they contact you are over!)

Real-Time Relevancy
Youtility is real-time relationship building. Make sure your business is available and adding value on all major social media or at least the ones where your potential clients frequent.

Summary
Your goal should be to make your content so valuable that others would gladly pay for it, or at the very least want to share it with other people they know.

While I have summarized portions of this book, there are a lot of great examples of how companies have applied these ideas that could spark a thought in your mind so I would recommend this book to any Entrepreneur who wants to Make Your Business Bloom. eRose Web also provides many services to help you market your business using website SEO and Social Media strategies that are customized to your specific business needs. We look forward to continuing the discussion on your Youtility!

Stop and Smell the Roses…Remember to Enjoy being an Entrepreneur!