Push vs Pull Marketing

Every business out there is a marketing company. It goes hand in hand with sales. You can't lose weight if you just exercise and not eat healthily. These two things must be happening together.

Same with marketing. If customers don't know about your business, they can't buy from you. As blatantly obvious as that is, we often push aside marketing in order to spend our money in other areas of our business. However, when marketing is done right, we'll be able to tell exactly how much it costs to acquire a new customer.

Most marketers throw crap on a wall and see what sticks. This might work in the long run but we'll lose out on small opportunities in the short run. Well crafted marketing campaigns are measured, tweaked, and improved.

Push vs Pull Marketing

Push marketing: Push enough advertising material out there so the goal is to reach as many people as possible and use our advertising dollars to bring in as many new customers as possible. It is very interruption based. We stop people from doing what they're doing in order to deliver our brand message.

Pull Marketing: Creating content on the internet and allowing the customers to be pulled into it or find it on their own. In a sense, they're already looking for a solution to their problem and our job is to be able to be found easily.

The number one objective is that we want them to go from our social media page right into our own website where we can either subscribe them to our email list or buy something from us.

Step one: Choose your Niche

Millions of websites, millions of businesses. There's no shortage of products, services, or information on the internet. Therefore, we have to niche down as much as we can so that we can only get the customers that would buy from us.

Map out your target market and make sure your website caters to that specific crowd. We should be able to tell exactly what your business is about after a few seconds of stumbling onto your website.

Step two: Become an expert

No one wants to buy from a novice. We all want to work with an expert and get the best quality we can for our money. We use marketing dollars to build our brand and reach more customers. What use is it if we reach our customers but they don't buy from us because they're under the impression that we may be inexperienced or unprofessional.

Authority develops trust and confidence in your services and products. Hence, we want to communicate that we're experts and that they can feel safe working with us.

Step three: Developing Media

Media is any type of content. Whether it is a blog post, youtube video, or infographic on Pinterest, it should be useful and relevant to the audience. Most social media marketers try to engage with their audience by sharing viral content.

What are we gaining by sharing a popular picture? We might get attention, but for all the wrong reasons. Our content should be unique and packed with value. The goal is to have our content go viral and be shared many times over.

Step Four: Use Social Proof

Word of mouth brings in a ton of customers. What other people say about your business is more important than what YOU say about your business. No one wants to be the first person to buy something. They want to make sure they're making the right choice.

Any good sales letter will have comments from happy customers. The more the better.
Social proof comes in many forms. From Facebook posts, comments, likes, and shares all the way to Instagram posts. It gives you more authority which is what we ultimately want.

Step Five: 80/20 Rule

New businesses don't spend enough time on their marketing, especially early on. The best strategy is to use the 80/20 rule. You'll find, generally, 80% of your profits come from 20% of your marketing efforts. That means one of your marketing efforts will be responsible for a majority of your profits. Good. We want that.

On the flip side, in the early stages of any business, you should be spending 80% of your time and resources on marketing efforts. This is so that we get the ball rolling and build some momentum for ourselves.

Pitfalls to avoid

Feast vs Famine cycle marketing: Some companies explode with their marketing and then get enough work to hold them over for a little while. Once that well dries up, they explode again with another marketing campaign. This causes a cycle where one quarter you can be really busy and one where it slows down. The solution is to have a continual marketing system in place.

Continuous marketing should be seen as a business in itself. The blog posts, videos, and other types of content you create are your ground troops. They are the first contact with your customers and we want them to bring them back to our website. We want to be constantly putting out valuable content in order to maximize our reach. Eventually, it becomes a snowball and the marketing starts to produce compounded results.

All in marketing: All in marketing is when we distribute most or all of our advertising budget into one campaign or channel. For instance, only using adwords to promote. The problem with this is that we've seen websites go under because of a Google update. We don't want to put all of our eggs into one basket. Try out as many marketing channels as possible and then scale up when you hit a winner.

Conclusion

One of the most important parts of any business is what you communicate to your customer. The best way to accomplish this is with a marketing funnel. Whether it is an online or offline campaign, the goal is always the same. We want new customers to learn about us and eventually buy from us.