Youtility: Why Smart Marketing is About Help Not Hype

We are cultivating a kick-ass speaker roster for the Explore events in 2013 that is sure to rock your socks off but also teach you, inform you and send you home with the knowledge that helps your digital marketing efforts. To that end we would like to introduce some of the brilliant minds that will be gracing our stages in Scottsdale, Minneapolis, Atlanta and Dallas.

This post is by Jay Baer of Convince and Convert.

Today’s consumers are staring at an invitation avalanche, with every company asking for likes, follows, clicks, and attention. This is on top of all the legacy advertising that envelops us like a straitjacket. There are only two ways for companies to break through in an environment that is unprecedented in its competitiveness and cacophony. They can be “amazing” or they can be useful. Lots of books have been written—one of them by me—that tell you how to be an amazing company. Pretty much all of them say you can win hearts and minds by doing things differently, providing knock-your-socks-off customer service, or fundamentally changing your corporate culture.

While being amazing can work, it’s difficult to do and doesn’t produce reliable, linear results. So instead of betting all your money on “amazing,” what if you instead relied on a simple, universal method of marketing and business success—one that’s never been more important or easier to accomplish?

What if instead of trying to be amazing you just focused on being useful? 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. But those are the most important letters in modern business, as you’ll discover at Explore Southwest.

Please consider checking out Jay’s new book, Youtility: Why Smart Marketing is About Help Not Hype, and his pre-release fan club. The first 200 people who register for Explore Scottsdale will receive a free copy!