Being Useful: New Marketing Techniques That Work

Are you wondering how your business can be more useful?

Do you provide youtility?

To learn about youtility and a new way of thinking when it comes to marketing, I interview Jay Baer for this episode of the Social Media Marketing podcast.
More About This Show

The Social Media Marketing podcast is a show from Social Media Examiner.

It's designed to help busy marketers and business owners discover what works with social media marketing.

The show format is on-demand talk radio (also known as podcasting).

In this episode, I interview Jay Baer, the founder of the award-winning blog Convince & Convert and co-author of The Now Revolution. His brand-new book is called Youtility: Why Smart Marketing Is About Help Not Hype.

Jay shares the many different ways companies are already providing youtility to their customers.

You'll learn the three categories of being useful and how to implement them into your business.

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Here are some of the things you'll discover in this show:
New Marketing Techniques
What's changing marketing that everybody needs to understand?

Jay believes that marketing is harder than ever. With the incredible growth in the number of media outlets, it makes it very difficult to achieve top of mind awareness in the ways that we used to be able to do.

Blogs and podcasts didn't exist before, but today they have huge audiences.

Companies now have to compete for attention—not just against other companies, but against everybody and everything.

Jay explains that if you take a look at your Facebook news feed, Twitter account or email inbox, you'll find a combination of both personal and professional relationships. Companies are competing for attention with consumers' friends and family members and are forced to use the same technologies to get on their radar.

Since 1994, Jay has worked online and remembers how people freaked out when they bought advertising on the web for the first time. He says at the end of the day, all these things are almost free, but somebody has got to pay the free. The guys who pay the free are businesses.

Listen to the show to find out what you need to do to succeed against everyone and everything.

The story about @HiltonSuggests and what the take-home message is for marketers

Jay talks about certain people who are an exception to the rule when it comes to being amazing. But he feels that most of us aren't amazing. So the best approach for us all is to be useful.

You need to create youtility. Jay defines youtility in his book as marketing that is so useful, people would want to pay for it.

Jay shares the story of Hilton Hotels' program called Hilton Suggests on Twitter and how the program came about.

You'll hear a great example of how they helped a guy on Twitter who was looking for a vet in the area. They helped him when he needed it most, and this will probably lead to him booking a Hilton hotel in the future.

Jay says the difference between helping and selling is just two letters, but in modern business those two letters make all the difference.

At a recent conference, Jay heard Gary Vaynerchuk say, "Everybody wants to be a hunter, but nobody wants to be a farmer." Youtility is about long-term play. If you sell something, you make a customer today. But if you help someone, you can create a customer for life. You need to start to think about marketing, customer acquisition, loyalty and retention over a longer time horizon.

You'll hear why Jay wishes that more businesses were less self-serving and more useful.

Listen to the show to hear how Columbia Sportswear uses indirect marketing and provides youtility to their customers.

What youtility is and what marketers need to understand

Jay says you wouldn't necessarily charge for youtility because it's marketing...