If you sell something, you’ll make a customer today. If you help someone, you’ll make a customer for life.
So here is some problem for most of today’s business owners;
- Right now, being top of mind is very difficult to achieve because audiences are being fragmented. To explain this further, the top TV show 30 years ago had 30%+ of the population viewing the show. Last year, the #1 show only captured 12% of the viewers.
- Fundamentally, buyers don’t trust business. They want more proof that you’re a trustworthy business.
Our personal and professional relationships have converged. OG WHATSAPP DOWNLOAD NEW VERSION. Take a look at your Facebook feed from the top down. You’ll notice it’s mixed with personal messages from your friends and family, along with commercial messages.
Are you more interesting than your competitors? That no longer matters. You need to be more interesting than peoples friends and family to get noticed.
So here’s the catch:
If you can create Youtility, customers will keep you close – they’ll follow you on Twitter, Facebook, they add a shortcut to your website on their browser.
SO WHAT IS YOUTILITY?
“Youtility is marketing so useful, people will pay you for it” – Jay Baer
Self-Serve Information – Provide information that’s easily accessible without someone actually having to make contact with you. So for a business, this might be on your website, it could be on a YouTube video, a Podcast, your Facebook page or countless others.
“Worry less about selling better and worry more about teaching better” – Jay Baer
Holiday World is a theme park which has all the information about each of their rides on their website.
They have 5 videos of every single ride they offer, all from different perspectives.
They talk in detail about each ride; what it’s made out of, what speeds they reach, how long the average wait time is to get onto the ride, etc…
Real Time Relevancy – Be great when your customers need you. EG: Be front of mind when they need what you offer, then move to the background when they don’t need you, then to the front again when they need you in the future.
How can you create Youtility?
1. Discover your customers needs.
In order to be useful, you need to really identify what your customers want. Try these as a starter:
- Search keywords
- Internal search
- web analytics
- social chatter
- customer surveys/interviews
2. Map those needs to executions.
How can you meet those customer needs? Here are a few ideas:
- Blog posts (ongoing series)
- Video (ongoing series)
- e-books
- Printed books
- Events
- Create an smart phone and tablet App
3. Market your marketing.
Executing the above isn’t enough. You’re not done yet. You now need to market whatever you’ve executed.
Content is fire, social media is gasoline to that fire. Use social media to promote Youtility first and your company second.
4. Make Youtility a skill, not a job.
Instead of creating a new job role for someone to work on Youtility, instead, make it a skill that all your staff learn and use in their daily work. It is THAT important.
5. Make Youtility a process, not a project.
Youtility is never finished. It’s just a part of your process that you should do on an on-going process. I think what Jay is saying here is that this is really similar to SEO. Learning how to do your on-page SEO should be a skill you and your staff develop. From there, on-page SEO should be something you practise weekly as you create new content online.
Stick to it – do it, not for the short term, but go all the way, not for a week or a year, do it for the next decade. Success comes through time and new content.
Jay Baer took the stage today with his wit and great sense of humour, coupled with some great insight into marketing and selling in today’s digital environment.
