How Being Helpful Can Transform Your Marketing

December 4, 2013
9:50 am

Posted by DMA Solutions Team

Hype is abundant these days: it’s in our Twitter feeds, it’s on our Facebook timelines, it’s in our email inbox each morning and it’s on every TV screen and radio station we tune in to. With all the marketing hype, a truly helpful message is like a diamond in the rough – it’s a message you simply can’t ignore.

Jay Baer, marketing strategist and author of the New York Times Best Selling book Youtility, explains in his book that smart marketing is about help, not hype. Baer says the only way to stand out amidst the information overload in our world is to be useful to your target audience. After reading Baer’s book (which we highly recommend you read!) the DMA team began to ask ourselves: how is the content we are sharing helpful to our readers or audience?

We challenged ourselves to become helpful and useful to our audience and in many instances that means making a conscious effort to be less “salesy.” In some cases our transition to “helpful” was easy, and in other instances we have learned old habits are hard to shake. Through this journey, we are convinced being more helpful has transformed our marketing and impacted our business for the better.

How Being Helpful Can Transform Your Marketing

Being helpful requires you to better understand your customer or target audience. In order to be helpful you need to first understand your customer’s pain points as well as their interests and needs! Helpful marketing will require you to consider your buyer personas and really get to know who they are in order to offer messages tailored to their needs.
Being helpful will allow you to prove your marketing works. By becoming more helpful, you will begin to find that you are able to better understand why certain marketing activities perform and others do not from an analytical standpoint. Measurable marketing can transform the way the fresh produce industry reaches and connects with target audience, and there are more ways to qualify and quantify your efforts than you think.
Being helpful creates information that is unique and tailored to a particular customer’s needs. You may have identified who your target audience is and what their pain points are, but if you want to be truly helpful you will deliver them the information they seek when and where they are looking for it. You can do this by gaining insights into the unique preferences of each of your customers or buyers and being available when they seek answers.
Being helpful has legs and is shareable and promotable. Helpful marketing isn’t about you. With this methodology, the content you generate will solve problems, entertain and be marketing that consumers WANT to consume and that buyers WANT to buy… and share with others.
Being helpful will become hard-wired into your company’s DNA. The helpful methodology will require constant revisions, shifts and adaptations to various changes in your marketing climate. You will need to think 10 steps ahead and build upon the content you already have, meaning that your company culture will adapt and hopefully embrace helpfulness to the point that they can’t think of marketing any other way.

The helpful methodology is applicable to both consumer and trade marketing, and is a step in the right direction for making changes in 2014. As the lines blur in our industry between B2C and B2B marketing methods, new methodologies and approaches are going to be what propels fresh produce consumption.