YOUTILITY (An Easy Reference Guide)
PART I: Turning Marketing Upside Down
Chapter 1: Top-of-Mind Awareness
Key Points:
As a marketing strategy, top-of-mind awareness is less effective than ever:
The media landscape is highly fractured.
Companies are fundamentally distrusted by customers.
Trust has a huge impact on marketing success.
Key Data:
Business are only trusted by 58% of global consumers.
When a company is distrusted, 57% of people will believe negative information about it after hearing it just one or two times.
Chapter 2: Frame-of-Mind Awareness
Key Points:
Being found doesnât create demand, it can only fulfill it.
Search enginesâ role in the website discovery funnel is weakening.
Key Data:
Search engines were used by 83% of consumers to find websites pre-purchase in 2004. In 2012, it has 61%.
More than 30% of American social media users say social media has driven them to make a purchase.
Chapter 3: Friend-of-Mind Awareness
Key Points:
Today, companies must compete for attention against consumersâ friends and family members.
If your company and its marketing are truly, inherently useful, your customers and prospective customers will keep you close, as they keep their friends and family members close.
Making your company useful without expectation of an immediate return is in direct opposition to the longstanding principles of successful marketing, and thatâs a good thing.
PART II: The Three Facets of Youtility
Chapter 4: Self-Serve Information
Key Points:
Weâve always tried to build loyalty with people, and now we must build loyalty with information.
If your company isnât trying to win the zero moment of truth, youâre losing customers you didnât even know you had a chance to get.
Always-on Internet access has made us all passive-aggressive.
Dearth of the salesmen: we now talk to a real person as a last resort, not as a first step.
Key Data:
In 2010, shoppers needed 5.3 sources of information before making a purchase decision. In 2011, shoppers needed 10.4 pieces of information before making a purchase decision.
From 2009 to 2011, American femalesâ use of voice minutes on mobile phones decreased by 12 percent. During the same period their text messages sent and received increased by 35 percent.
In B2B, customers will contact a sales rep only after independently completing 60 percent of the purchasing-decision process.
Chapter 5: Radical Transparency
Key Points:
Creating customers by answering their questions is imminently viable and carries remarkable, persuasive power.
Unless it inhibits ease-of-use, there is no downside to providing extraordinarily detailed information to your prospective customers.
It doesnât matter whether anyone in your industry is providing self-serve informationâbig companies are, and theyâre training all consumers to expect it.
Key Data:
Companies with websites with 101 to 200 pages generate two-and-half times more leads than companies with 50 or fewer pages.
Companies that blog fifteen or more times per month get five times more traffic than those that donât blog.
Chapter 6: Real-Time Relevancy
Key Points:
Youtility is real-time relationship building. Youâre either sufficiently useful at any given moment, and thus can connect with the customer, or youâre not.
For decades, the key question has been âhow valuable is the brand?â The key question moving forward is âhow valuable are you apps?â
Within a generation every customer in every developed nation will have never known a world without the ability to access information at any time through a mobile device.
Key Data:
By 2014 there will be more mobile Internet users than desktop Internet users.
Forty-five percent of American social media users research products or brands on a smartphone multiple times a week.
There are 2.9 billion mobile subscriptions in Asia and the Pacific, compared to 969 million in the Americas.
Part 3: Six Blueprints to Create Youtility
Chapter 7: Identify Customer Needs
Key Points:
You have to understand what your prospective customers need to make better decisions, and how you can improve their lives by providing it.
Search engines, social chatter, and web analytics data will help you understand customer needs.
The best way to understand customer needs is to ask real customers.
Chapter 8: Map Customer Needs to Useful Marketing
Key Points:
Determining which is the optimal conveyance for Youtility requires a level of research beyond understanding customer needs.
You have to understand not just what you customers need, but how and where they prefer to access information.
Atomize your marketing to reach a larger audience.
Chapter 9: Market Your Marketing
Key Points:
People are not going to magically find your Youtility, you have to add promotional support.
Content is fire, and social media is gasoline.
Use social media to promote your useful information first, and your company second.
Your employees are your most importantâand most over-lookedâaudience.
Chapter 10: Insource Youtility
Key Points:
Everything important in business starts as a job, and eventually becomes a skill.
Being useful must be part of your company DNA.
Involving a wide variety of employees not only makes it easier to create and maintain helpful information, it also increases effectiveness because they bring credibility that centralized, official communication doesnât have.
There are four types of Youtility insourcing:
Circumstantial insourcing
Voluntary insourcing
Assisted insourcing
Mandatory insourcing
Key Data:
Company experts are trusted by 66 percent of people; regular employees are trusted by 50 percent; and CEOs are trusted by 38 percent.
Chapter 11: make Youtility a process, Not a Project
Key Points:
Youtility requires a never-ending, constantly reinvented and refined process.
There are three reasons this must be an ongoing program:
Customer needs change;
Technology shifts;
New and better ideas are conceived.
You canât schedule greatness, and it doesnât respond well to deadlines and ultimatums.
Chapter 12: Keeping Score
Key Points:
If Youtility is going to be more than a marginalized novelty for you and your company, it must be measured effectively.
There are four categories of measurement that matter:
Consumption metrics
Advocacy and Sharing metrics
Lead-generation metrics
Sales metrics
Return on Investment is absolutely calculable for many types of Youtility. Where it isnât, consider correlation analysis.
Taken from: "Youtility"
by Jaey Baer, 2013