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
Integrated Marketing and Media 53  |  Add Yours

Agencies Don’t Turn Your Back on Digital Marketing

Ah yes. Digital marketing. Once a great champion. Now a broken-down has-been, struggling to remain relevant in a changing world. Like Joe Namath, but with a keyboard. So goes the story in many agencies today. In their zeal to jump aboard the social media express, agencies are neglecting to shore up the other corners of [...]

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Integrated Marketing and Media 58  |  Add Yours

Social Media Makes Everything Marketing

It’s truly fantastic that so many companies are starting to monitor the social media conversations around their brands and their industry at large. But what’s not fantastic is the reflexive apoplexy when some of those conversations inexorably are less than complementary. I have seen corporate marketers (and even PR firm folks who should know better) [...]

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Integrated Marketing and Media 277  |  Add Yours

Get Shorty – The Elevator Pitch is Dead

For all the talk about Moore’s Law and the notion that computing power increases unabated, there’s not enough talk about another law that has equal importance in marketing and public relations. I’m going to call it the Law of Boundless Brevity. It dictates that over time, all communication becomes steadily truncated. We’ve gone from looong [...]

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Email Marketing Advice 44  |  Add Yours

May I Contact You Please? The Evolution of Permission

Guest post by Doug Wick (@dougwick), who thinks a lot about marketing and is a Director of Business Development for Powered, a social marketing company in Austin, TX. He writes frequently for Powered’s blog, The Engaged Consumer, and at DougWick.com. In the past decade of direct marketing online, the focal point has become contacting consumers [...]

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Guest Posts 78  |  Add Yours

Use Online Listening for Competitive Research

Guest post by Mike Corak (@mikecorak) who oversees strategic planning, Web development, and marketing services for Tempe, Arizona integrated agency Off Madison Ave. Are your customers telling you everything you need to know to improve the bottom line? Conducting primary market research and audience research, and purchasing secondary studies are fundamental ways communicators inform and [...]

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Conferences and Events 58  |  Add Yours

Advanced Social Media Synergies

Last week, I was part of a panel discussion on how travel and tourism organizations can move beyond the typical Facebook and Twitter accounts to take their social media efforts to the next level. Part of the annual Arizona Governor’s Conference on Tourism, I was joined on the panel by the excellent Angela Berardino from [...]

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Integrated Marketing and Media 84  |  Add Yours

Let’s Stop Swooning Over Social Media

Are you overdoing it on social media? Just a little? I’m a proponent of social media. In fact, I’m a proponent that gets paid to convince others that social media is valuable. But, like in the early days of Web design, SEO, PPC, email, and banners before it, there’s too much swooning and not enough [...]

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Conferences and Events 42  |  Add Yours

19 Top Takeaways from B2B Forum

Earlier this week, I had the pleasure of attending and speaking at the MarketingProfs B2B Marketing Forum in Boston. As usual for MarketingProfs‘ events, it was a superlative, intimate mixture of excellent speakers and smart, eager attendees. For me, the highlights were the presentation by Sandy Carter of IBM on their use of social media, [...]

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Email Marketing Advice 9  |  Add Yours

Are New Customers Killing Your Company?

(Originally written for MarketingProfs MPdailyfix blog) I’m sure you’ve heard the maxim that it costs a lot more to get a new customer than it does to retain an existing customer. It makes perfect sense, right? So why is it that we spend so much time and money in violation of that credo? At the [...]

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Email Marketing Advice 17  |  Add Yours

Social Media Adds Viral Frosting to the Email Cake

Are you enabling your email subscribers to spread your message via social media? Call it Forward to a Friend 2.0. Call it the inevitable marriage of two sides of the customer relationship coin. Call it the next big thing in email marketing. The hand-wringing in the email community about the impact of social media is [...]

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