Pull Marketing vs Push Marketing
Does your business use push marketing or pull marketing? Are you aware of the difference and how it affects the growth of your business? In this article we are going to define what pull marketing is and how it can be the most effective way to grow your business.
What is Pull Marketing?
Have you ever noticed how much of a “push” world we live in? Think about it, from pushing keys on your keyboard to pushing the gas pedal in your car to pushing your stress levels, just about everything we do involves pushing.
Now think about your marketing in this way. Does your business rely on pushing marketing messages and campaigns out in hopes of someone seeing and being enticed by them? Would your business generate any leads or sales without your push marketing?
Pushing takes a lot more energy than pulling, especially when it comes to marketing. Pushing marketing messages out can be interruptive and even annoying if done incorrectly.
Pull marketing allows your most qualified prospects to come to you.
Loud, noisy marketing campaigns aren’t needed when you’ve implemented a successful pull marketing strategy.
Effective pull marketing strategies consist of the following components:
- Content that engages your target audience(s)
- User experiences that leave lasting impressions
- Customer service that “wows” people
What is Push Marketing?
Before we help you prepare your pull marketing strategy let’s outline the differences between push and pull marketing for a better understanding of each.
As outlined above, pull marketing consists of great content, experiences and service. Push marketing, on the other hand, consists of:
- Speaking at (instead of with) prospects and customers
- Sending out messages to unwilling, unreceptive people
- Creating campaigns or experiences that ignore user wants and needs
We have seen push marketing work for some companies, but in the majority of these cases it was just a numbers game. In other words, the small percentage of business generated from pushing marketing to a large number of people justified the efforts. This has actually been the norm for the advertising / marketing industry for the past century or so. Big companies like Pepsi rely on mass market penetration to hit the numbers they need to sell their products.
Unless you’re a large corporation that can afford to throw a lot of resources at mass push marketing campaigns, then using a pull approach is essential for creating a consistent growth model for your business.
How to Implement a Pull Marketing Strategy
Over the years, we have implemented just about every type of marketing strategy you can think of (everything except spamming of course) – for ourselves and for our clients. Each time we found pull marketing strategies to generate the best ROI and attract the most loyal customers. Since we have determined pull marketing to be the more effective way to market a business we’d like to help your business benefit from it as well.
Create Engaging, Targeted Content
Successful websites start and end with great content. First, determine who your target audience is (you may have more than one) as you cannot create targeted content without knowing what your audience is made up of. Next, create unique, relevant content that speaks directly to your target audience. This targeted content will make a bigger impact on your visitors as it speaks directly to their needs.
Build Memorable User Experiences
Memorable experiences should come from both the website(s) you drive people to and the products / services that your customers interact with. Start by analyzing the data of users (website analytics or customer usage data) to know where you should be focusing your energies. Then, use this data to make the proper adjustments to engage your visitors and customers longer and more effectively. Don’t stop there though….make sure to continue tracking this data and optimizing these experiences.
Provide Amazing Customer Service
If providing consistent quality customer service is not already part of your company’s culture, then it is going to be difficult to make that change. However, it’s never too late and it only becomes more important as social media has made customer service synonymous with marketing. Begin by encouraging employees (from sales to support) to go out of their way to excite customers. Positive customer service stories should start to surface at which point you will receive valuable testimonials.
Start ‘Pulling’ More Business In
To be clear, we are not against push marketing strategies. We actually think that they are sometimes necessary in certain cases. However, when it comes to getting the best ROI for your marketing dollars and attracting long term customers, then pull marketing is tough to beat.
As you could probably tell from our recommendations above, pull marketing is not something you can do overnight. It is an ongoing process, and often involves a paradigm shift for some companies.
Don’t get discouraged or overwhelmed though. There are companies, like ours, that have put pull marketing into practice and continue to help businesses, like yours, from benefiting from these strategies. If your business needs help developing its pull marketing strategy, then let us know as we’d love to help.
Do you need help developing a pull marketing strategy?