Understanding push vs. pull marketing can be confusing when trying to improve a marketing strategy. At some stages, a company uses one or both marketing strategies. Knowing when and how to use each marketing style is essential.

A company needs to understand these strategies to maximize its growth. Proper execution of each strategy is crucial for real growth. Keep reading to learn about the push and pull marketing and how to execute both.

What Is Push Marketing?

Push marketing involves engaging a specific audience with marketing messages. The prospect may see the message without showing any previous interest in a product.

Traditional marketers may refer to push strategies as aggressive marketing. Meaning, a business persistently communicates with prospects to boost product engagement.

Push marketing is proactive as it tries to ask new prospects to engage with a business or product. A billboard on a busy highway is an example of push marketing.

If I have a product and want to sell a lot of merchandise quickly, it may be best to invest in more push marketing. Keep reading to check out some push marketing strategies to consider for your business.

Display Ads

Display ads appear online when you're busy browning or on your social media feed. They are often used to educate customers or in awareness campaigns.

Display ads can be static or animated. They can help to educate, engage and entertain audiences. Advertisers on search ad networks make up to $2 for every $1 spent.

Field Sales

Field sales are one of the oldest and most effective push strategies. It involves hiring salespeople to promote and sell products outside the office.

Salespeople have to meet with prospects face-to-face and present a company's products. They play roles like educating customers, providing demos, and building relationships with customers.

A good sales rep can provide a product development team with valuable ideas. They can gather competitor data and user sentiments to support product improvements.

Trade Show Marketing

Trade shows can be an exciting user engagement strategy. Companies invest tons of resources to make their shows glamorous and memorable.

A trade show may feature branded multimedia, interactive booths, live performances, and after-parties to elevate engagement. A trade show event can offer us a chance to show how unique and relevant our products are.

Trade show marketing is push marketing. It helps customers discover and learn about new products. It also helps brands show off new and existing customers.

Cold Emails

Cold emailing is an unsolicited marketing email to a new prospect. These prospects may have never heard of the email sender.

While cold-emailing is tough, it's still one effective push marketing strategy. The email open rate in Australia is 32.4%, according to Litmus.

When to Use a Push Marketing Strategy

Push marketing is an advertising or promotional strategy. Its goal is to create product awareness and drive sales.

Most managers with an urge to drive immediate sales will use push marketing. This strategy is often helpful for:

Product launches and releases
Seasonal promotional campaigns
Stock clear out campaigns
Introducing new business into the market
Sales growth strategies

Push marketing is a quick-fix strategy to heighten product visibility and increase sales. It's likely to be competitive and costly because of targeting many cold prospects.

What Is Pull Marketing?

Pull marketing is a strategy to lure qualified leads to your business. It uses your brand's awareness and online visibility to pull visitors to your products.

A pull marketing strategy is likely to be digital to attract more visitors. It takes a strong online presence for customers to a company's products on their own.

An example of pull marketing at work is the website SEO company Canberra. If I'm searching for SEO services in Canberra, I might visit seocompanycanberra.com.au.

Push marketing is a passive kind of marketing strategy. A business creates its outlets and touchpoints and waits for customers to find them. It takes time but helps our companies save on customer acquisition costs.

What are Examples of Pull Marketing Strategies?

Pull marketing is a great strategy to increase leads and build brand loyalty. Brands use pull strategies to increase awareness, attract new customers and keep existing ones.

Pull marketing may involve various tactics to entice customers and increase engagement. Engaging tactics may help boost customer loyalty and encourage online and word-of-mouth referrals.

Read on for examples of common pull marketing strategies.

SEO

SEO (search engine optimization) is the king of push marketing strategies. A killer SEO strategy can make an unknown business outshine 47% of Australian companies lacking an SEO strategy.

SEO refers to when a company works on its site structure and creates SEO content to improve its search engine rankings. High-ranking websites can increase a brand's exposure and visibility and lead to more traffic.

Social Media Marketing

A social media marketing strategy helps fulfill customer expectations by increasing a company's accessibility. Eighteen million or 71% of Australians are avid social media users.

A brand that's active on social media is closer than ever to its customers. Regular sharing of quality content and engagement with users can boost marketing results.

Email Marketing

Email push marketing works like a charm with segregated or personalized strategies. Personalization emails based on segmentation can boost sales revenues by 50%.

Personalization is tailoring email content to the specific needs of an audience. Personalized emails can be effective for promotional, awareness, nurturing, and upselling campaigns.

Video Marketing

Video is a tried and proven visual marketing strategy. Research shows using visuals like videos improves conversions by a whopping 86%.

Video as a marketing tool has revolutionized how we engage prospects and customers. Video content can combine with SEO, social media, blogging, email campaigns, etc.

Video gives us multifold ways to engage and interact with our customers. We can share brand stories, customer testimonials, product demonstrations, how-tos, short snappy content, and more with videos.

When to Use Pull Marketing Strategies

A pull marketing strategy should be the gold standard in the following instances:

Growing organic traffic on websites and social media
Establish credibility and authority in a niche or industry
Promote brand awareness and engagement
Improve customer retention and loyalty
Cut customer acquisition costs
Aligning the brand with customer needs

Many of these marketing goals are achievable with a long-term marketing strategy. Pull marketing takes time to bring results, but it is ever worthwhile.

Push vs. Pull Marketing: A Combined Strategy

Push and pull marketing strategies can work together for the betterness of our businesses'. Successful businesses use these two strategies together.

To grow our businesses, we have to look for a mix of push and pull that can work best. We need to pull strategies to attract new customers and keep existing ones. Likewise, we should use push strategies to increase our exposure and sales.

What should we do to get the best out of a combined push and marketing strategy?

Align Marketing With Your Customers

More often, your marketing strategy depends on customers' behaviours. We have to figure out an effective strategy to reach our target customer.

We must find out the specific concerns of our buyer personas to launch the right strategy. What are their current challenges and favourite channels? We should ask questions that will help us develop an effective marketing strategy.

Consider Current Opportunities and Challenges

Your short-term marketing goals can help define your marketing approach. You can push the product when your sales are declining. You can launch targeted ads when there's an increased search for your products in a specific locale.

Take Into Account Your Budget

Money can be a hurdle in growing any business. Pull marketing should be the chosen strategy when our marketing budgets are small. SEO, branded videos, and social media are the best free pull marketing strategies.

A good marketing budget is an incredible opportunity to explore the best of both worlds. Think about push marketing to speed up growth and pull marketing to reinforce the brand.

Look at Your Growth Goals

Both push and pull marketing strategies are essential for growing a business. At the start, push strategies should be the priority. New companies must create awareness about their products to grow their market share.

A strategic marketing plan calls for a mix of pull and push marketing strategies. Companies need to establish a solid customer base for stability and sustainability. Loyal customers are a precious asset.

Increasing customer retention by 5% can raise profits by 25-95%. And a 10% increase in customer retention can boost a company's value by 30%. In the long run, pull marketing helps reduce push marketing costs.

Push Vs. Pull Marketing: Get Help With Maximizing Both

Figuring out when to use push vs. pull marketing comes down to a variety of factors. Consider business goals, budget, ability to produce, etc. Overall, it's most beneficial to have a marketing strategy that includes both.

What is your current marketing strategy and is it helping you achieve your revenue goals? SEO Company Canberra can help you get the best out of your push marketing strategy. Contact us today to get a free quote to engage one of our experts.