Marketing podcast with Jay Baer – author of Youtility.

Integration and convergence are the two concepts I’ve been drilling on most for the past few years. Quite frankly, marketing has always worked better when integration is considered, but today’s markets, buyers, humans want and expect more than consistent messaging across platforms.

What’s driving the market today?

• People want and expect content that is educational, useful and personalized.
• People want and expect marketing that provides utility and purpose
• People want and expect to interact and engage with brands on many fronts
• People want and expect to join and participate in community in addition to completing transactions.

Organizations that get this, that foster this and that build marketing strategies and campaigns that take full advantage of this, will build customer loyalty and word of mouth lead generation in ways that cannot be matched by competitors trading on lower price.

More is not the answer – better integration is. You don’t need more content, more followers, more engagement, more marketing – you need all of these things to work together more effectively to create a more useful experience for customers and prospects.

Below are a handful of key questions and suggestions related to each of the four drivers leading the marketing challenge today.

Content – The best path to increased long tail SEO and customer loyalty – Key Question – How can you use existing and new content to create engagement and opportunity?

• Content based autoresponder series – series of videos on how to do X.
• Dynamically displayed content based on search term.
• Invitation to content series based on a series of questions
• YouTube Video channel selector
• Geo location-based content
• Turn Q and A into knowledge base
• Figure out what visitors can’t you find and create it

Utility – Using marketing to be more useful – Key Question – How can you make your marketing so useful people would pay for it?

• Personalized video responses to questions
• Create a Q and A platform (Quora)
• Geo-location self-serve information

This is the point where I need to tell you that this week’s guest on the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is Jay Baer, founder of Convince and Convert and author of Youtility: Why Smart Marketing Is about Help Not Hype. Baer’s book is chock full of ideas and campaigns from brands that get this idea in a big way. Youtility is a quick read and a must read if you want to start adopting a mindset of usefulness and true integration. If you want to explore this important driver in-depth you must pick up this book.

Social – Increase sharing and decrease search engine dependency – Key Question – How can you use social media to increase friend reach and create new customers?

• Google+ Hangouts to YouTube
• YourBrandSuggests – Monitor Twitter to make industry related recommendations (great example of this in Youtility)
• Visualize industry related data – most popular X on Twitter, aggregate industry related tweets
• Facebook lead capture
• Facebook contest by market segment
• Surprise upgrade program
• Facebook advertising content series
• Message of the day promote across staff social networks

Community – Leverage referability to build trust and awareness – Key Question – How can you turn your customer base into a vibrant community?

• Market segment hosted communities
• Proactive referral programs
• Crowdsourced database or app
• Membership programs with customer led content or moderation

And the biggest question of all – How can you create more integration and convergence?