By Diana Palau, on 17 May 2022
Should you create a push or pull strategy? This is an important decision in digital marketing.
Push and pull strategies are opposites of one another, but they can still complement each other. To help you plan your marketing campaigns, let's take a look at what exactly they are, when to apply them, and some examples.
What Is a Pull Strategy?
Pull strategies seek to attract users to a product or service. They target consumers seeking to solve a need and are also referred to as inbound marketing.
The objective is to position your brand in such a way that the customer can find it and nurture the relationship until conversion and loyalty are achieved.
When to Apply a Pull Strategy
Pull strategies have many advantages, including generating trust, accounting for all moments in the buyer's journey, encouraging quality leads, and increasing brand recognition.
Pull strategies are more effective in the long-term and they serve to reach customers who have already identified their needs, rather than to make them aware of new needs.
5 Examples of Pull Strategies
SEO. When users identify a need or have a problem to solve, the first thing they do is search on Google. SEO places your website in the top positions of search engines and makes it easier for potential customers to find you.
Content Marketing. Content is very important for SEO, but it also serves to provide value for the user and build trust in the brand.
Lead generation. Once you have managed to get the potential customer to visit your website, you should encourage him or her to leave behind an email so that you can keep communicating with him or her. One of the most common strategies to do this is to offer users valuable content (for example, an ebook or a checklist) in exchange for leaving their email address.
Lead scoring/nurturing. Lead scoring consists of assigning a score to each lead based on the information left in the form and their interactions with the brand. Depending on this score, we will send them different messages that meet their needs to accompany them on the road to conversion, which is known as lead nurturing.
Generating opinions and recommendations. The opinions of other users are a key factor in making purchasing decisions. For this reason, pull strategies include techniques to encourage satisfied customers to share reviews about our products or services.
What Is a Push Strategy?
Push strategies, also known as "outbound marketing", seek to bring a product or service to the user. That is, the company sends messages to consumers that aim to make users aware of the brand.
In many cases, push strategies are linked to traditional advertising.
When to Apply a Push Strategy
Push strategies allow you to reach a greater number of users since you control the reach of the campaigns according to your budget. This generates a higher volume of leads and conversions.
For all these reasons, push strategies are effective in the short term. They also complement pull strategies – for example, launching an ad campaign on social networks to attract more traffic to your website and generate leads.
5 Examples of Push Strategies
SEM: SEM can be understood as a complementary strategy to SEO since it places paid advertisements in search engines so that they appear when a user makes a related search. It is recommended to center a SEM strategy on keywords with high search intent.
Social media ads: Social ads target users on social networks to offer them segmented products based on their habits and preferences. The key to success lies in large amounts of information about users that can be used to segment ads and reach the right audience.
Affiliate marketing. This strategy consists of promoting products or services through third-party channels, such as a website or YouTube channel. You pay only when the recommendation results in a purchase. For this technique to work, affiliate sites must be related to your industry and publish quality content.
Calling "hot" leads. Telemarketing is not a very popular technique, mainly because it has been abused to offer products behind cold doors. But calling can be a very effective strategy if you target leads that are in the last stages of the conversion process and send them an offer that meets their needs.
Fairs and exhibitions. Classic trade shows still work well, especially in the B2B sector. They are a great opportunity to demonstrate your product live to potentially interested users and generate quality leads.
