Numerous books, articles, speeches, blog posts have been written over the last few years about why content marketing is required as part of any company’s marketing and sales strategy.
Youtility: Why Smart Marketing Is about Help Not Hype by Jay Baer, does an excellent job explaining why content marketing is the best approach to reaching your audience. Importantly, it also shows examples of great content marketing strategies that have been implemented by successful brands and start-ups.
Baer’s foundation for content marketing is stated at the outset:
- First, top-of-mind awareness is less effective than ever because (a) you can’t promote to consumers you can’t find and (b) consumers fundamentally mistrust businesses.
- Secondly, the only way to truly differentiate yourself is by being useful to your customer. Have Youtility for your customer; not your business. Trying to be an amazing business by being funny, interesting, human, or another quality, is like swinging for a home run at every at bat: you may get the occasional home run, but you will also strike out a lot.
Recent studies show consumers are digesting more information than ever before making a decision.
They need at least 6 data inputs before making the simple decision on where to buy a chicken sandwich, and will contact a business only after independently completing 60% of the purchasing decision.
What does this mean to you? It means you have to provide information consumers need to make decisions. The essence of Youtility.
Youtility also overcomes another problem. Because information can be found anywhere, everywhere, and at any time, your product or service is in danger of becoming commoditized. Frankly, everything you know, have learned, and think about your product can likely be found on the internet. Therefore, the more helpful you are to your clients in helping them make decisions, the less commoditized your product becomes.
Interestingly, Baer proclaims that Youtility is never finished. You have to be in it for the long haul because customers’ needs change, technology shifts and evolves, and new ideas are conceived. To counter at the speed of the market, Youtility is the only choice. To try and develop different advertising campaigns, marketing campaigns etc. often simply takes too much time and is too expensive an investment; by the time it’s put into the marketplace, consumer expectations have shifted.
For those businesses contemplating a content marketing campaign, this book gives a lot of great examples of how companies have successfully done it. For those companies debating whether to even get into this area, this is likewise a great book as it puts forth that rationale as well.
If you have any questions about this book feel free to contact me at 248-455-6500 or [email protected].
