Value added marketing

In Youtility, Jay Baer argues for a new approach to marketing. To see why, he starts by examining the existing approaches and the historical contexts in which they developed, and how those contexts have changed over time.

First, there's "top of mind awareness", in which businesses want their particular brand to be the first one that comes to mind when you think about their industry. This is achieved mainly by constant, ongoing media exposure, and arose in the era when there were only a few major outlets through which most people got their information: three major television networks, a couple of local newspapers, and a handful of radio stations in your area.

This approach to advertising made quite a bit of sense when an advertiser could pay for a prime slot and expose a third of the American viewing public to their message. But those days are long gone. Now people have so many more options, and the highest rated shows draw only a fraction of what they used to. In effect, the old advertising platforms that made this work are becoming increasingly disintegrated (or fragmented, to use Baer's term). But many advertisers keep trying this approach, even as it becomes less and less effective. The saddest is when they try to use new tools like social media in the same old ways, and Baer gives some hilarious examples of epic advertising fails (one story about a DJ trying to self-promote on twitter had me simultaneously cringing and laughing out loud).

Next is what Baer calls "frame-of-mind awareness", a.k.a. inbound marketing. The idea is to make it so that when a potential customer is ready, they can find you. This arose with the advent of the yellow pages, and has only grown in importance with the rise of the internet and is the idea behind search engine optimization. And this is all well and good, says Baer, but it's just not enough if you want to set your business apart from your competition. To be sure, it's more efficient than the top of mind approach, but it can only fulfill existing demand, not create new customers. And on social media, your competing for customers' attention not just against other businesses in your industry, but against their actual friends and family.

This is where the new approach comes in. Baer calls this "friend of mine awareness", which consists of actually providing value to your potential customers through your marketing. Such value often (though not exclusively) takes the form of information, whether it's just radical transparency about your products (here Baer cites McDonald's Canada's campaign to answer any questions about their food, which has significantly increased public perception of quality), or going beyond that and educating and better enabling them to make informed decisions. Whether it's starting a YouTube channel and building viewership as you grow your content, or creating an app that helps your customers use your products more effectively, there are many ways to provide real "youtility".

Baer discusses several other aspects of his friend of mine awareness approach to marketing and provides many other illuminating examples. He even gives the exact formulas you need to figure out the return on your investment (again with examples) so you can decide if this approach will be worth it for your business. But I'll let you read the book if you want to find out what else it has to offer.

And if you want to read more from this kind of substance over style, anti-bells and whistles approach as it applies not just to marketing but to business more generally, you might also enjoy Joe Calloway's Be the Best at What Matters Most.

http://www.amazon.com/review/R32E1G2UUU2HKC ( )