Si Quan Ong
Content marketer @ Ahrefs. I've been in digital marketing for the past 6 years and have spoken at some of the industry’s largest conferences in Asia (TIECon and Digital Marketing Skill Share.) I also summarise books on my personal blog.
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Looking to learn the difference between push and pull marketing and when to use them? You’re in rightplace. In this guide, you’ll learn some examples of push and pull marketing, which is more effective, and how you can combine both strategies together for your business. Pull marketing is a marketing strategy that focuses on helping your target customers to discover your brand, products, and services. Here are three examples of pull marketing. Customers turn to Google whenever they’re looking for answers to a question or solutions to a problem. While searching, they’ll discover brands, products, and services. You can appear for these queries if you optimize your website and its web pages for search engines. This process is known asSEO. Broadly speaking, SEO involves: Further Reading Customers who like your product will tell their friends and family. And research from Nielsen shows that 83% of people trust such recommendations. While getting word-of-mouth is mostly out of your control, you can attempt to influence or encourage your customers to spread theword. Generally, this means creating a great product, building a likable and well-respected brand, providing amazing customer support, and regularly engaging with your customers. Further Reading Organic social media is pull marketing. Thismeans: Push marketing is a marketing strategy that focuses on placing or nudging your products or services in front of your target customers. Here are three examples of push marketing. Cold emailing is when you send an email to someone with whom you have no previous relationship. Usually, this is to get something from them, like promoting a new product, acquiring links, andmore. Generally, this is doneby: The offline version of cold outreach. Instead of an email, marketers send physical mail to physical addresses in order to introduce a new product or offering. While this usually means a simple envelope, other variations like lumpy mails (i.e., mails that are not flat) and mails with actual money have also been sent to grab attention and prevent the mail from being thrown away. Whether it’s a billboard or an advertisem*nt on Facebook, ads are considered push marketing because they “interrupt” whatever you’re doing to show you a product or service. Further Reading The main difference between push and pull marketing is that push marketing focuses on pushing a product to customers, whereas pull marketing focuses on getting customers to come toyou. Neither push nor pull marketing is more effective than the other. Both are legitimate marketing strategies. Which one you use depends on your customer profile, your goals, and the business stage you’re at. However, there are some situations where one might it better than theother: No one knows who you are.You have no brand, no customers, and no content. So, at this stage, you likely have to do things that don’t scale. You have to go out there and get customers. Typically, these involve push marketing tactics such as cold emailing (Intercom, Birchbox), attending events (Pinterest), going door to door (Airbnb, Alibaba Group), and even flyers (Groupon). That isn’t to say pull marketing won’t work for a business at this stage. But it takes time for a company to create content and rank high on Googlefor queries that matter. Ideally, you should be executing both strategies—acquiring your first customers via push marketing and building your brand for the future via pull marketing. In fact, research shows that most companies achieve the greatest marketing effectiveness if they invest around 60% into brand-building and 40% into sales-boosting campaigns: Pull marketing takes time. Your campaign may be over even before its effect kicksin. In this scenario, push marketing tactics like ads might be preferable. Pull marketing tactics tend to compound over time. Take SEO. As long as your articles rank on Google, you’ll receive consistent and passive search traffic. The reason is that pull marketing works like a flywheel. In the beginning, you won’t see any huge effects as the flywheel is getting “pushed.” But as you go along, it becomes easier to get results. Here’s an illustration of how word of mouth works like a flywheel: Comparatively, if you’re using a push marketing tactic, like advertising, traffic stops when you turn off the campaign. Thanks to the compounding effect, pull marketing tactics are often cheaper in the long run. For example, our website gets an estimated 1.6 million monthly search visits. If we had to acquire this traffic via Google Ads, it would cost us $2.8 million per month. Considering that our content marketing team isn’t paid that amount, we can say pull marketing is a better long-term investment. The best businesses use both pull and push marketing. After all, if both strategies work, why would you want to choose one over theother? Here are some ways you can combine both pull and push marketing together: This is a strategy used by many companies. The idea is simple: For example, HubSpot’s post on writing an effective email gets ~14,000 search visits per month and ranks for over 2,900 organic keywords: When someone discovers the article and reads it, HubSpot encourages them to sign up for its email list via a “content upgrade”: Once the prospect has handed over their email address, HubSpot can now contact them via its salesteam. Of course, its sales team doesn’t reach out to everyone. There are too many people, and not everyone is willing and able to buy. What HubSpot does—and many companies do too—is “score” theseleads. Basically, each prospect is given a score based on the actions they take. Someone who’s downloading a beginner’s guide is likely new to marketing and not an ideal prospect right now. But if they continue to consume HubSpot’s content and download more advanced guides, they may become a good prospect in the future. Comparatively, someone who opts in for HubSpot’s free marketing dashboard tool is likelier to be a prospect who makes a purchase: Further Reading Nobody’s going to find your content randomly. You need to help people discover it by putting it in front of them. One reliable way to promote your content is viaads. This is the reason why we run ads for most of our blog posts.Since we take an average of 10-20 hours to create each piece, it’ll be a waste if no one seesit. Here’s one of our Facebook ads promoting our post on the best marketing Facebook groups: If Facebook ads are too competitive for you, remember there are also other ad platforms like Quora ads too. If you’re using tactic #2 and wantto reach new people who are likely to be interested in your content, you can consider creating a lookalike audience. A lookalike audience is one that shares similar characteristics with whichever “source audience” you upload on the ad platform. Since your “pulled” audience is made up of people who are actively seeking out the type of content you’re creating, they’re perfect as your “source audience.” Links are an important ranking factor. And one way to get more of them is to build them. This means reaching out to other websites and persuading them to link toyou. To start, you need a list of websites to reach out to. One way to find these websites is to find ones that cover the same topics as you. Here’s how: For example, searching for “home workout” gives us >400,000 pages. But that’s too many pages to look through, so let’s add a few filters to narrow things down: This brings us down to around 10,000 pages. If you want to narrow the list down even further, play around with the filters. Once you’ve done so, find the email addressof the website owner. Then reach outto them to see if they can link toyou. We have a video that covers the link building process from start to finish, so I recommend watching it: Neither strategy is better than the other. Depending on the scenario and your goals, one can be more suitable than theother. But the best businesses don’t discriminate between the two strategies. Instead, they combine the strategies for greater effectiveness. Did I miss out on anything about pull marketing? Let me know on Twitter.What is pull marketing?
Pull marketing examples
1. Search engine optimization (SEO)
2. Word ofmouth
3. Social media
What is push marketing?
Push marketing examples
1. Cold emailing
2. Direct mail
3. Advertising
Pull vs. push marketing
Is push or pull marketing more effective?
Scenario 1. You’re launching a new product/startup
Scenario 2. You’re promoting a one-time offer/short-term campaign
Scenario 3. You’re building for the longterm
4 tactics to combine push and pull marketing together
1. Generate leads with pull marketing and close them with push marketing
2. Run social ads to promote your content
3. Target your ads to lookalike audiences built from your “pulled” audience
4. Send outreach emails to boost awareness of your existing content
Final thoughts