YOUTILITY

Why Smart Marketing Is About Help, Not Hype

The difference between helping and selling is just two letters. But those two letters are critically important to your company’s success.

You’re not competing for attention only against other, similar products. You’re competing for attention against everything. To win in this hyper-competitive environment, you must ask “How can we help?”

If you sell something, you make a customer today, but if you genuinely help someone, you create a customer for life. This is Youtility.

Includes interviews with dozens of companies practicing Youtility, and provides 6 blueprints for building Youtility in your company.

Available for pre-order soon (get up to 7 exclusive bonuses) at http://YoutilityBook.com
Content Marketing 11  |  Add Yours

3 Angles to Create Magnetic Content with the Triangle of Relevance

Guest post from Angie Schottmuller, an interactive Jedi, e-commerce expert, and multi-channel strategist at Interactive Artisan. What makes online content great? Is there a tangible metric, or is it purely subjective? I think it comes down to relevance. The more relevant the content appears, the more magnetic it becomes. Within this relevance I’ve discovered a formula for [...]

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Blogging and Content Creation 24  |  Add Yours

Using a Social FAQ to Kick Start Content Marketing

If you conquered four words, you’d have a better social media program than 90% of all companies. If you just utilized “thank you” and “I’m sorry” appropriately and often, you’d be in pretty good shape. But getting to true sociability requires more than just replying to direct inquiry. You have to use content marketing to [...]

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Content Marketing 3  |  Add Yours

Why Should Old Spice Get to Have All the Fun?

Guest post by Clinton Bonner, President of NoSox Productions; a character based brand story-telling firm out of Westbrook, CT. It was 2010… The Toyota Sienna Family somehow made mini-vans cool and the Old Spice Guy literally rode-in on a white horse and into our social lives. The emergence of amazing character-based brand storytelling on the [...]

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Content Marketing 35  |  Add Yours

What I Learned About Humanity From a Steakhouse

Last week, in the post “Why Your Special Offer Isn’t” we talked about the importance of humanization. Faced with an invitation avalanche, consumers will respond to the stories that resonate with them on a personal level. And those stories don’t just have to live in social media. Myril Arch’s Story — Humanizing a T-Bone Recently, [...]

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Blogging and Content Creation 25  |  Add Yours

5 Search and Social Trends for 2011

Recently, I participated in a Webinar with my friend and client Chris Baggott of Compendium. We talked about the convergence of search and social media, and how content marketing is bridging both areas. We settled on 5 trends that we think will be especially important in 2011 (read or print yourself via Scribd, or see [...]

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Book Reviews 16  |  Add Yours

Demystify Content Marketing with Content Rules

The intermediary is dead. We don’t need to rely primarily upon the media or some other conduit to communicate with our prospects and customers – we can do it ourselves. Eventually, every company is going to have to think of itself as a TV station and a magazine. Telling your story and answering customer questions [...]

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B2B Social Media 16  |  Add Yours

Rocket Content – Your B2B Secret Weapon

Guest post by Ian Greenleigh, the Social Media Manager at Bazaarvoice – the market and technology leader in hosted social commerce applications. He also blogs at Dare to Comment. There’s no doubt about it, those of us tasked with enterprise-level B2B marketing have some incredible hurdles to overcome. The business decision makers (BDMs) that have [...]

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Blogging and Content Creation 54  |  Add Yours

Content Lessons Learned From 25 Popular Blog Posts

I’ve been writing Convince & Convert for more than two years, and have produced more than 300 posts. Mostly from me, with some terrific assistance from talented guest authors. Last week, I was on a content marketing discussion panel (moderated by Jeff Rohrs) at the ExactTarget Connections conference. I was joined by Joe Pulizzi from [...]

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Content Marketing 51  |  Add Yours

5 Step Process for Social Media Success

Social media makes big companies feel small again, and gives small companies a natural advantage because they are closer to their customers. It doesn’t matter what industry you’re in, you have interesting stories to tell. Finding and sharing them is the first step toward social media success. What is your process for harvesting stories within [...]

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Blogging and Content Creation 226  |  Add Yours