Audio Review: Youtility: Why Smart Marketing Is about Help Not Hype by Jay Baer

The difference between helping and selling is just two letters

If you're wondering how to make your products seem more exciting online, you're asking the wrong question. You're not competing for attention only against other similar products. You're competing against your customers' friends and family and viral videos and cute puppies. To win attention these days you must ask a different question: ?How can we help?”

Jay Baer's Youtility offers a new approach that cuts through the clut­ter: marketing that is truly, inherently useful. If you sell something, you make a customer today, but if you genuinely help someone, you create a customer for life.

Drawing from real examples of companies who are practicing Youtility as well as his experience helping more than seven hundred brands improve their marketing strategy, Baer provides a groundbreaking plan for using information and helpfulness to transform the relationship between companies and customers.

I first saw this book mentioned by another blogger and after hearing her rave about it decided to use an audible credit to get my very own copy. I know what you may be thinking, seriously Hillary are you going to be reading marketing books for fun now?!  Before you decided to skip over this review let me just say that this book is not dull at all. Most marketing books will have you saying and doing a lot of stuff that will make you feel icky. If you are serious about making your blog your business, you must know how to market yourself.

There has gotto be  one million marketing books out there. These books I have found, tells you how to manipulate your clients into buying your products. For some people, this is all good, but if you are like me and are tacked with pangs of guilt at how you “won” your business, then there is a much better way.

Most marketing books will tell you all about Facebook ads and the like and how to push for the sale. I have to admit that I tried the whole your business is gonna fall apart script on more people than I care to think about. I always felt icky, and I kept thinking that there has to be a better way but damn if I knew what THAT way was.

Then I came upon this book. I decided to go for your audio version cause I seem to have forgotten how to read with my eyes.  I just hoped that it was not more of the same tired trope that we see in way to any marketing campaigns. Instead, this book says that to gain a customer for life is to provide help when needed. I don’t mean the kind of support where you pay 29.99 for 15 minutes but rather the type of assistance that proves invaluable to the client. I will be the first to admit that I am gulity of trying o get people to cash in on their hard-earned money instead of asking what I can do to help people.

Youtility also goes into depth on how you research to see if there is a demand for your product. Instead of pushing all of your expertise and courses and all of that down people’s throat instead you could make a survey ( i love the typeform platform myself) to gauge whether or not people want or need your product.  There is almost nothing worse than to spend hours making a product only to hear crickets when you launch.

After reading Youtitliy, I can see where I made substantial mistakes n how I approached the whole marketing thingie. After reading this book, I can see where it would be beneficial for me to back off or to offer to help instead of trying t twist someone’s arm to buy the most expensive product that I have.

Helping people is at its core about building that trust factor. If there is no trust built up then it is that much harder to get people to part with thousands of dollars. If people DO have that trust, then they will be much more likely to buy from you. No matter the price.