Review: Youtility: Why Smart Marketing Is about Help Not Hype

Youtility: Why Smart Marketing Is about Help Not Hype by Jay Baer
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Marketing is something I've always wanted to learn more about, especially digital marketing. I've of course dabbled in it to get the word out for various side ventures, and I'm on several social media platforms, but that's as far as my knowledge goes.

That's why I was happy when my Online Business Book Club members voted to read and discuss Youtility: Why Smart Marketing Is About Help, Not Hype by Jay Baer.

Not only is this a fast and enjoyable read, but you learn so much, all backed with great anecdotes.

Just a few highlights:

1. Whereas marketing used to be about top-of-mind or frame-of-mind awareness, in this day and age of information overload and social media, it must lead to friend-of-mine awareness to have any long-lasting impact. What this means is if you're marketing is useful to your customers, they'll remember it, share it, and turn to you when they're ready to buy.

2. To be useful, provide you customers with all the answers they need in a self-serve format and if possible, in a useful app that makes the information easy to access and relevant for their current experience. And don't look for it to lead to immediate sales.

3. Youtility (useful marketing) should be an ongoing, measured process at your company that is part of its DNA and gets all employees involved. It's also key to not only understand what your customers need and how they prefer to get that information to truly be useful, but to also then market that usefulness so that word gets out.

This is one of the best and most readable books I've read on marketing and it has totally shifted my thinking on the topic. I highly recommend it.