To Push Or To Pull
By: Stefan Venken
Tags: Branding, Email Marketing, Marketing, Content Marketing, Loyalty Program

To Push Or To Pull

Which Marketing Approach Wins?

Both styles of marketing have their pros and cons, and leaders need to ask themselves:

Should we push, or should we pull?

Outbound:

Ah, campaigns.

A classic approach to marketing, Push, or ‘Outbound’ marketing involves pushing your message out to as many people as possible via the usual mass-media channels:

TV and Radio (Above the Line)

Offline posters and billboards (Out Of Home)

Paid ads online

Generic emails and newsletters to your list

This type of marketing is a typically B2C (business to consumer) exercise that tends to heavily utilise product features and benefits to solve a problem.

This type of advertising tends to be expensive, and relies on getting in-front of as many eyeballs as possible knowing statistically a few are likely to move through your marketing funnel towards making a purchase.

That being said, thanks to improvements in the data; for instance, Facebook’s demographic-based or lookalike audience ad targeting, it is possible to begin to personalise this experience and improve your conversion rates.

LinkedIn, for example, allows you to target people with a specific job title, which is more suitable for a B2B (business to business) organisation, who would typically benefit from Pull or Inbound style marketing.

We typically see a very short term effect on our ad spends. The Facebook, Google and other 3rd party ecosystems are able to provide qualitative traffic and having a good offer will make them convert consistently. However the moment you drop your investment the in-stream is halted as well.

Meaning paid online ads are basically a mathematical formula. Are we able to ‘grow’ our customer base at a sustainable cost. If done in-house (to avoid the fees on top of the ad spend) and being brutally honest with platform evaluations on a weekly basis it can be done. Knowing that you are paying 50 euro for a buyer means you need to offset that partly with the product margin of the first purchase but mainly through a solid Customer Lifetime Value evolution. Once we started looking at those raw business metrics our channel mix shifted a lot.

Inbound:

Pull-style marketing is proving to be the method of choice mainly for B2B organisations (of course, the smartest companies use both) that might be looking to spend less on advertising and instead rely on a search or content marketing strategy. Common channels are:

Content Marketing (f.e. blogs and podcasts)

Organic posts on social media

Search engine optimisation

Personalised Email

Content marketing is a sound strategy for service type organisations as it allows them to position themselves as thought-leaders and pull the interest onto them via whitepaper downloads, seminar materials, webinar signups and more. Personally I tend to see this as a valid approach even for pure retail players provided that they are able to explain their added value.

Due to the smaller, more intimate connection with the audience, a more personalised approach can be given and higher conversion rates can be expected.

This type of marketing would see your phones ringing, instead of being used to cold call.

All of these styles could be referred to as business development or lead generation and are ultimately aiming to secure new customers for your business: it’s the approach that differs.

Personally, I like to set up “lead magnets” that pull interest in, as it allows for more easy automation via emails or messaging, with a follow-up sales-oriented flow.

Within our current setup we see roughly 50% of all purchases happening directly through an email, meaning a customer clicks on a link and does the purchase in the same session. We admittedly have a high mail pressure — which leads to a disconnect with the younger generation — and have invested a lot in personalised offer and targeting setups to optimise the customer experience and make sure our mails don’t shift from inbound to an outbound approach.

This means we invest a lot in A/B testing our targeting algorithms and validating the product selection personalisation while looking into new channels like chatbots and shopping integrations on social media to open up channels that resonate with younger demographics.

We should never completely replace human interaction, and instead, identify various touchpoints in our marketing funnels that represent excellent opportunities to connect both online and off. We need to focus on creating personalised customer experiences that happen on their preferred channels.

The Verdict:

Photo by Ben Sweet on Unsplash

A “Human-to-Human” approach to marketing performs best, and this means really understanding your audience personas and demonstrating an awareness of them. Within push we optimise our targets and personalise the messages based on behavioural and historical information of the customer and its related cluster persona. We want to make sure that every message is as relevant as possible and gives our customers the validation that we care.

An often forgotten human-to-human marketing approach lies in the ‘invite your friends’ programs. They are giving your fans and ambassadors the opportunity to get a small benefit of your relationship while exposing your value to their friends. In Southern Europe we see >20% of all new buyers coming from this setup while seeing conversion rates of more than 25% in all markets. If you are convinced of your value and your products, enable your fans to benefit from sharing it.

In any marketing communication — whether push or pull — it’s your opportunity to go beyond driving traffic, and demonstrate the real value you create.