I recently picked up a copy of Youtility: why smart marketing is about help not hype by Jay Baer and found it interesting enough to blog about.
Youtility is about how to engage your customer by being useful to them, thus gaining the limited and valuable resource — their attention. In this post I will highlight the interesting parts of the book, and also try to convey the overall themes and content.
Note: Given that I know almost nothing about marketing and many of the concepts in the book are brand new to me, this may not be the most the most eye-opening post to some.
Youtility
The message of the book is “being useful is the best kind of marketing” follows from the arguments that:
- The amount of time and attention that people have is limited and valuable, to both them and to marketers.
- The increasing amount of marketing people are exposed to is reducing their engagement with it, making it more difficult to convert a person to a customer.
- The increasing amount of information available has made people require more information before they make any decision.
- The best way to gain a person’s attention and engage with them is to be informative and useful. The goal of this should not be to sell something, but to encourage a relationship between a potential customer and a company.
Jay Baer first wrote about the idea of Youtility as a blog post, which describes this non-linear approach to marketing. Non-linear because this form of marketing is not done with the direct goal of sales, but done to sincerely be useful in order for a customer to voluntarily engage with the company.
Youtility follows the “if you give a man a fish” proverb:
If you sell something to someone, you make a customer today; if you help someone, you make a customer for life.
Who Provides Youtility?
Throughout the book there are many examples of how companies are currently providing youtility to the customers and how it has worked for them.
McDonald’s Canada’s created a website that answers any questions about their food that people might have. Questions like ‘Is it really 100% beef?’ and ‘Why does the advertised burger look different to the actual burger?’ have resulted in answers including the viral video Behind the scenes at a McDonald’s photo shoot. These answers were candid and not trying to sell the menu, but openly inform the customer about their food. This openness has paid off as many myths about McDonald’s food have been dispelled and the company has been able to grab the attention of many people.
Geek Squad used a similar method of youtility by creating free videos of how to fix and maintain computers, software and other technology, e.g. How to install an amplifier and sub-woofer into a car. Giving out this information gave them credibility as experts in the domain, so when someone needed help they would call the place they trusted.
@HiltonSuggests is a Twitter account that provides information to anyone about restaurants, hotels and more. This is a place that people trust to ask where to get meal in a city they are unfamiliar with. This means that the people who interact with @HiltonSuggests are in an unfamiliar city, their main customer base. So when these people ask where to find a hotel, it will try direct you to a nearby Hilton hotel.
The Informed Customer
Marcus Sheridan (The Sales Lion) in the foreword of Youtility discusses how an informed customer is a double edged sword. Saying more informed customers are easier to deal with and have a better understanding of what is currently on offer. However,
Educated consumers are sometimes threatening to sales-people, […] information changes the balance of power
Sheridan, a ‘pool-guy’ business owner, chalks up his businesses success to his helpful blog which answers common questions about pool design and installation. His example of using a blog that is helpful, as compared to other companies who use blogs to brag, encouraged customers to trust his advice and company. This is a similar Youtility strategy to Geek Squad.
His blog ultimately created more leads and sales in a time where the rest of his industry was suffering because of the economy. He did not advertise directly, but by providing information and being useful generated traffic and served as the way in which customers found out about his company. When they were ready to buy a pool, they knew where to go, they went to the place they got all their information from.
consumers of all types expect to find answers on the Internet now, and companies that best provide that information garner trust and sales and loyalty
Sheridan also noted that informed customers have knowledge before they buy something, this means that you have less work to do to explain to them their options. Additionally, he saw his closing rates increase as when they contacted him, they had already seen the options and made a decision to buy.
Types of Marketing
A large portion of the book is used to compare marketing with Youtility against other classic marketing strategies. Baer breaks down marketing strategies into three types:
- Top-of-mind awareness
- Frame-of-mind awareness
- Friend-of-mine awareness
Top-of-mind awareness
Top-of-mind awareness is constant marketing so when the customer is ready to buy they think of you first. For example, Coca-Cola advertisements everywhere encouraging people to want thier drinks when then are thirsty. This strategy requires lots of advertising, and your product to be available everywhere. It also has one message for everyone, a dumb (if effective) marketing strategy. Increasing however, as the media landscape becomes more fractured where there is more places to find and consume content, reaching everyone with this approach has never been more difficult. This shotgun strategy might work for some but is not for all.
Frame-of-mind awareness
Frame-of-mind awareness is reaching customers when they are ready to buy, e.g. a store-front display that attracts attention of a shopper walking past. This also includes directories, like the yellow pages and Google, for when someone knows they want something and so are looking for a place to get it. Being the top result with an appealing name will drive people to your company. This means that the company is passively waiting for a customer to choose them, making predictions about when the customer will walk in, or click a link, difficult to predict.
Friend-of-mine awareness
Friend-of-mine awareness is where a company attempts to become a trusted resource to a person, so when they are ready to be sold something the company is already there. Providing value to your customers, beyond your sales pitch, gives customers a reason to be constantly in touch. This strategy of helping the customer is not about directly making a sale, it is about the relationship.
The three aspects Baer points out as important to successfully use friend-of-mine awareness are:
- Self-serve information: helping people find the information they want.
- Radical transparency: providing all answers, being sincere.
- Real time relevancy: Be useful at the particular time, location and context a user in, then be in the background till next required.
Zero Moment of Truth
The Zero Moment of Truth is the instant where the customer can either progress down the sales path, or retreat, it is the flight or fight response in sales. It is an e-book publicised by Google that has many concepts, one of which is that customers are increasing the need for more information before buying something. This is true for me, before I buy anything I require at least two independent reviews, and the full specifications of what I am buying.
The increase in required information is not a reflection of our increasing distrust, but more because there are more information sources available. If a customer has all the necessary information at their fingertips, then making good decisions is easier.
Always on Internet access has made us all passive-aggressive.
This assertion comes after the fact that a person would more likely read a review of a product than send an email directly asking a question, and much more likely than walking into a store and talking to a sales rep. This is what Baer describes as the Self Serve Culture, where sales representatives are less involved when convincing a customer to purchase.
You are in two businesses. You’re in the ‘whatever business you’re in’ business, and you’re in the media business. […] Both B2B and B2C companies with 101–200 pages generate 2.5 times more leads. Companies that blog 15 or more times per month get 5 times more traffic. source: Hubspot 2012
Being available at the Zero Moment of Truth is where the real time relevancy comes in to play in the friend-of-mine strategy.
You’re either sufficiently useful at any given moment, and thus can connect with the customer, or you’re not. It’s real-time relationship building.
For this strategy context is key, understanding where they are, what they are doing, what they like and what they might like will give better indicators of how to be helpful.
The future of this hyper-relevancy may be taking applications […] to their logical extreme, using “anticipatory computing” to push information to participants before they even realise they need it.
This future is coming to fruition with the rapid adoption of mobile, as Baer says:
Within a generation every customer and prospective customer of every company in every developed nation will have never known a world without the ability to access information at any time through a mobile device.
How to You can be Yousful with Youtility
This book also gives a few helpful tips on how to use friend-of-mine marketing strategies and how to create youtility. First the questions must be asked:
- How do your customers discover information?
- What are their preferences for consumption?
- What motivates them to take action?
Use Google tools to understand your customers; Google Analytics, Google Trends, Google Suggest, Google WebMaster, Google Keyword Planner, Google Correlate. All these provide insight into your customers on the other side of the screen. WebTrends, HubSpot, KISS metrics are also useful tools.
These tools are used to find your customers problems, which is not the same as finding a solution. Figuring out the real customer needs into actual results is the difficult part. Before creating an app, writing a blog, making videos, using social media make sure that is the right decision, otherwise you may end up with disappointing results.
The next hurdle is telling people about the solution. Just creating something useful is not enough if no one knows about it. This may seem self referential, marketing your marketing, but you have to get the ball rolling somehow. If it is useful and you are not selling it then it should not be difficult gaining adoption.
The mindset to create such useful solutions for customers is not a project, it is a process that can be refined and reinvented. It is a long term goal, not a short term gain. More sales or getting wide spread adoption is not the goal, it is the result. The goal is to provide useful, valuable, helpful assistance to people who are, or could become, your customer.
Providing something for people does not mean you should not measure its value to the company. Some metrics to measure your success are:
- Consumption metrics: How many people are using your product?
- Advocacy and Sharing metrics: How many people mention it on social media or blog about it?
- Lead Generation Metrics: How many people considered a purchase?
- Sales Metrics: How Many people were sold something?
- Return on Investment: How much it cost v.s. leads and sales metrics? This can be compared to your other forms of marketing, with the understanding that the goal is long term and not necessarily immediate.
Measuring things like trust may be a bit difficult, but as long as the youtility created is sincere and not just a business as usual marketing attempt, people will start to associate your company with being genuinely helpful. That is not a bad thing.
Actual Book review
This book makes some great points about marketing during the digital and mobile revolution. It is also a great place to start if you want to dig deeper as it references many good books, companies, studies and websites. It even comes with an excellent references list at the back (like any good publication should).
I think the target audience for this are marketing or management people looking at understanding the direction that technology is taking in their domains. Some of the book for me felt like it was preaching to the choir, e.g. the discussion of why it is a good idea to have a blog. However, at the same time I found many of the well made arguments in the book to be counter-intuitive, so I learnt a few things and think it was still worth the read.
The main problem I had with the book is its constant self referencing to Youtility, like it is desperately trying to coin the word. But I think that is how marketers usually write, so I will let that slide :)
Note: please leave a comment or suggestion. This is the FIRST marketing book I have ever read, and I would love people to have a discussion and point out other resources that would be interesting.