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Marketing requires a balance between capturing immediate customer attention, driving sales, building brand awareness, and cultivating long-term brand loyalty. Sounds like a lot, right? It is, but it can be achieved with a mix of two complementary strategies: push and pull marketing.
Because they are complementary, there's no need to think in terms of push vs. pull marketing. Instead, we develop a plan for using these essential tools together to accomplish different goals that all lead to success.
What Is Push Marketing?
Push marketing involves promoting — or “pushing” — products or services to consumers through direct communication like ads or promotions. The goal is to encourage immediate action, like a purchase, store visit, or website conversion.
Here’s an example:
A furniture retailer is opening a new location and wants to drum up buzz and start sales strong. The owner launches ads using digital audio, TV, and print introducing the store and touting big deals for opening weekend. It also sends out targeted emails to customers who have shopped at its other locations. These are examples of “push” marketing to build brand recognition and incentivize shoppers.
What Are Popular Push Marketing Strategies?
Push marketing is designed to produce short-term results. You launch the ad campaign and hope for a fast response. Common push strategies include:
- Sales promotions and discounts. Limited-time deals to encourage quick purchases.
- In-store promotions. Giveaways, samples and attractive displays or offers to drive immediate traffic to websites and brick-and-mortal locations.
- Traditional ads. Using programmatic advertising, TV and radio to cast a wide net.
Remember the furniture store? Its push marketing goal was to kick off sales and get established in the market.
What Are Popular Push Marketing Tactics?
The great thing about push marketing is you can use digital and traditional media — or both. It’s a good idea to activate more than one platform to “push” your message out most effectively. That way, you’ll reach different audiences. With push marketing, more is more.
Digital Audio Ads
Thanks to its loyal, engaged users and advanced targeting capabilities, based on user behavioral data and market segmentation, digital audio is powerful push marketing tool. Digital audio gets into users’ ears. They’re a captive and receptive audience, and they’re often listening at home (near their computers), in the car, or on the go (near the point of purchase). Platforms like podcasts and streaming services allow precise audience targeting based on gender, age, location, and consumer behavior targets, increasing effectiveness.
TV and AM/FM Radio Ads
Broadcast media’s “one-to-many” delivery is a great way to cast a wide net and reach a mass of consumers. It’s like having a microphone in front of a massive crowd — even if only a few people listen, you’ve gotten the word out. See AudioGO's radio advertising.
Email Marketing
If you have an email list of potential clients, you can push out targeted emails with promotions and announcements. Be sure to include relevant links and promotional codes to encourage conversion. Using a customer relationship management system, brands can segment their email lists based on user preferences and behaviors. Your outreach will be more personalized and effective.
Social Media
Create urgency and excitement around a product launch or sale. Marketers can use social media to create buzz for — or “push” — new products and drive users to sales and events. Social media is great for creating a sense of immediacy and encouraging sharing between consumers.
Example of Push Marketing
A new health food company uses a multi-channel digital marketing strategy to create buzz and drive sales for its launch. It targets eco-conscious foodies with personalized email marketing campaigns, social media ads on platforms like Instagram and TikTok, and digital audio ads on popular wellness podcasts. These ads feature influencers sharing quick product demonstrations and limited-time discounts, driving immediate interest.
The brand also uses programmatic advertising, leveraging real-time analytics and automation tools to tailor its messaging and optimize campaign performance. By monitoring conversion rates across all channels, the company can quickly adjust its strategies to gain maximum impact — improving brand awareness, boosting sales, and achieving a stronger return on investment.
What Is Pull Marketing?
Pull marketing focuses on attracting customers by providing valuable, engaging content that brings them closer to your brand. The objective is to create demand generation over time, ultimately building long-term relationships with customers. The focus here is on brand awareness and authority.
Now let’s talk about pull marketing. In contrast to pushing out information, pull marketing is designed to bring the consumer closer and build loyalty. Marketers “pull” users in with consistent information and subtle reminders. The focus here is on brand awareness and authority. The objective is to create demand generation over time, ultimately building long-term relationships with customers. That way, when someone needs a product or service, your brand is top of mind. Pull marketing brings the consumer to your brand.
To effectively “pull” in consumers, you need content. Content establishes your brand as an expert in your field. That could be blog posts, videos, social media marketing, email newsletters, and white papers. These efforts increase your SEO standing. When a user goes on Google and enters keywords related to your products, services or industry, you’ll appear higher in the results. That sends users to your digital assets and you hook them with expert content.
What Are Popular Pull Marketing Strategies?
Pull marketing is all about building awareness and credibility through ongoing content creation. Unlike push marketing, it isn’t tied to an event or launch. Pull marketing aims at the top of the sales funnel when consumers are seeking information, but before they’re ready to act or engage. Pull marketing typically uses digital media and works over time, gradually bringing potential customers into your sales funnel.
Content Marketing
A well-executed content marketing strategy focuses on creating value for the audience through educational, entertaining, or problem-solving solutions. It uses blogs, videos, whitepapers, and infographics that address consumer pain points. By offering insightful content, businesses can establish themselves as trusted authorities in their field, pull in potential leads, and convert them into loyal customers.
SEO Optimization
Search engine optimization (SEO) means making your website and its contents as open and satisfying to search engines and their users as possible. This includes the use of keywords and fresh content to rank higher in search engine results. Creating content that addresses common queries helps users find value in your business and makes them more likely to engage. Additionally, technical SEO plays an important role, encompassing elements like page speed, mobile responsiveness, and site architecture to improve search rankings. Using artificial intelligence, marketers can identify high-performing keywords and analyze search behavior to refine their SEO strategies for better visibility and higher conversion rates.
Influencer Marketing
Leveraging social media platforms and trusted influencers to subtly introduce your brand can effectively pull consumers in.
What Are Popular Pull Marketing Tactics?
Pull marketing often uses digital marketing tools to attract and engage a target audience. These tactics include:
Digital Audio
With the ability to reach highly-targeted groups of listeners, digital audio advertising is effective for pull marketing, too. Brands can create spots that introduce their products or service and also speak to issues, such as public health or education. Digital audio ads focus on storytelling or providing educational content to establish credibility and trust, subtly drawing people toward the brand.
Podcast Sponsorships
Host-read ads build credibility by leveraging trusted voices. Podcast listeners often are devoted to their favorite hosts and they trust them to recommend products and services. By using a podcast host to voice an ad, you’re connecting your brand with a trusted source, which elevates your brand’s status with the podcast’s listeners. Influencers like podcasters have sway with consumers.
Social Media Engagement
Shareable posts can foster connections and build trust. Most search results come from Google, which rewards websites that post original content and update it regularly. By sprinkling keywords throughout your social media content and consistently posting fresh content, you can maximize your SEO. When users search for relevant terms, you’ll appear in their results, increasing your chances for conversion.
Email Marketing
Good old fashioned email is still a powerful marketing tool. With emails, marketers can customize and personalize messages. For pull marketing, brands can use emails to establish their authority and expertise in a vertical.
Example of Pull Marketing
To illustrate pull marketing, let’s use a couple examples.
A major Midwestern hospital is launching a new surgical center. To establish the business, they launched a strategic pull marketing campaign.
Instead of using traditional ads, the hospital creates content to educate consumers on surgical centers, what services they’ll offer, and the top-notch medical experts that will staff the center. The hospital produces blog articles, email newsletters, videos featuring interviews of surgeons, as well as related social media posts. Digital ads run on podcasts featuring the hospital's community services. By educating and informing users, the content “pulls” the consumers closer. And, since Google rewards sites with original content, it also raises the hospital’s SEO results for search engine marketing.
When it is time to book a surgery, a patient will remember the new surgical center and book it. They’ve been pulled in.
A new fitness app implements a pull marketing strategy to build brand awareness and foster customer engagement. The app maker's website creates a blog featuring expert articles on wellness, nutrition, and exercise, optimized with SEO strategies to attract health-conscious readers. On social media, it shares visually appealing workout tutorials and success stories, encouraging followers to engage and share.
To enhance user engagement, the app offers free downloadable guides through its website. The guides show trustworthiness and authority while collecting customer data for future advertising campaigns. On fitness-related podcasts, digital ads voiced by the hosts are run. With email marketing, the brand sends personalized tips and motivational content to subscribers, nurturing relationships over time. This approach builds trust, solidifies brand loyalty, and ensures the app is top-of-mind when users seek a fitness solution.
Advantages and Disadvantages of Push vs. Pull Marketing
Push Marketing Advantages
- Immediate results. Push tactics generate lead generation and customer acquisition quickly, which is ideal for time-sensitive campaigns.
- Broader reach. Push marketing can cover a wide audience, especially through digital marketing and traditional channels like TV and radio.
- Easy to scale. With the help of automation tools and data analytics, businesses can scale their push marketing efforts across multiple platforms.
Push Marketing Disadvantages
- Cost. Depending on the channel, push marketing can require a significant advertising budget.
- Short-term focus. While push marketing is excellent for immediate sales, it doesn't always contribute to long-term brand positioning or customer loyalty.
Pull Marketing Advantages
- Long-term customer engagement. Pull marketing helps establish brand loyalty by continuously providing valuable content to users.
- Cost effective. Over time, pull tactics, especially through SEO strategies and content marketing, can produce a return on investment (ROI) without the same ongoing costs as push campaigns.
- Builds authority. Through consistent content creation, brands position themselves as experts, which can increase conversion rates over time.
Pull Marketing Disadvantages
- Slower results. Pull marketing is a long-term strategy that requires patience to stick to the plan while waiting for the returns.
- Resource intensive. Regularly creating high-quality content and optimizing for SEO can require a significant investment of time and resources.
Combining Push and Pull Marketing for Maximum Effect
A successful marketing campaign can blend push and pull tactics to create a balanced approach that meets immediate sales goals while building long-term brand equity. The key is to establish your priorities and try to balance both. Digital audio ads can help.
We’ll give you an example using podcast advertising for push and pull marketing. Healthy Living food is launching a new protein bar, and they want to buy digital audio ads to reach young female consumers interested in health and wellness podcasts. That’s an easy push strategy. But digital audio analytics indicates that men 18 to 34 listening to sports and comedy podcasts are also interested in health food, so the advertiser buys time there too, extending the potential customer base. That’s more push marketing.
To build customer loyalty, the podcast’s host — an influencer in the health and fitness industry — talks about her own wellness journey and what’s worked and failed. She mentions the new protein bar, but it’s part of the discussion, not an overt plug. This is an example of pull marketing.
Buying time on podcasts allows the brand to push the product and pull consumers closer.
If you strike a balance between push and pull marketing, your brand can maximize its advertising efforts and grow short-term results and long-term ROI, customer engagement and conversion rates.