Push vs Pull Marketing – Know the Difference and How to Use them

In this competitive era, two promotional strategies employed to get the product to the target market are Push and Pull Strategy. While the Push strategy, the idea behind pushing the company’s product onto consumers by making them aware of it at the point of shopping. Pull Strategy relies on the notion, “to get the buyers come to you”. The two kinds of strategies differ in the way customers are approached.

The term is obtained from logistics and supply chain management. However, their application in marketing is not less. The movement of a product or information is the basis of push and pull Strategy. This post excerpt will let you know the difference between push vs pull marketing, and how to use them in your business.

Definition of Push Marketing

The strategy in which marketing channels are utilized to push the product or service to the sales channel is called push strategy. It describes the movement of products & services and information through intermediaries to the ultimate consumer. In this Strategy, the company takes its product to the consumers, who are neither aware of it nor seek it. Still, the product is offered to them through different promotional activities.

The strategy uses trade show promotion, the point of sale display, direct selling, advertisement on radio, television, emails, etc., to influence consumers’ minds and reduce the time between discovering the product and buying it.

Definition of Pull Marketing

The business strategy, which strives at creating interest or demand for a specific product or service of the target audience in a way that they demand the product or service from the channel partners, is called pull strategy. In this Strategy, the consumer needs are intensified by directing marketing strategies on them, which leads to the ‘pulling’ of products. Pull Strategy employs methods like social networking, blogging, strategic placement of a product, word of mouth, media coverage, and so on for reaching a large audience.

In more precise terms, any method employed to generate consumer demand for the product is called the Pull strategy. It is one such Strategy in which consumers actively seek products of a specific brand due to its goodwill, quality, protection, and reputation.

Key Differences Between Push Vs Pull Marketing

The Key differences between push and pull marketing are given below:

1. The kind of marketing strategy which includes the direction of marketing efforts to intermediaries is called push strategy. On the other hand, the marketing strategy, including marketing efforts to the end-user, is called pull strategy.
2. In pull strategy, the customer demands communication of products or information, while no such communication is required in push strategy.
3. Push strategy strives at making customers aware of the product or brand. As against this, pull Strategy urges the customer to seek the product or brand.
4. Push strategy employs sales force, trade promotion, money, etc., to convince channel partners to promote and distribute the product to the ultimate customer. Conversely, pull Strategy utilizes advertising, promotion, and any other form of information to prompt customers to demand products from channel partners.
5. Push strategy concentrates on resource allocation, whereas pull strategy is involved with responsiveness.
6. There is a long lead time in push strategy. However, it is just the reverse in the case of a pull strategy.
7. Push strategy is suitable when there is low brand loyalty in a category. Unlike the pull strategy, it is suited for products with high brand loyalty. Consumers are well known for the differences in different brands, and they opt for a particular brand before they go shopping.

How to choose push vs pull marketing

The following are prevalent scenarios in which either push or pull marketing would work best, and scenarios while combining these two strategies would be helpful:

Push marketing

• While trying to create a new sales channel with distributors
• While looking to increase short-term sales
• While seeking to enhance the awareness of your brand
• When you are beginning a new product or service
• When you are running within a niche market

Pull marketing

• When your target audience already understands what they are looking for
• When your brand is well-known
• When you are prioritizing the branding of your business
• When you are seeking to build long-term customer relationships

How to Make the Most Out Of Push Marketing

Despite the “conventional marketing” nickname, push marketing has its place in new sales strategies. This method is right for those who want to boost awareness about their product, have a comprehensive customer base, and sell it more actively. 

The most successful push marketing will strategically interrupt potential customers. Organizations should look to inform and entertain potential customers quickly. If they feel annoyed by your content, it will be far more to persuade them of your product’s worth.

Arguably the most important part of a push marketing strategy is how attention-grabbing it is. Most people notice thousands of ads per day. As a society, we have become proficient at ignoring those that do not appeal to us. You will have to cut through the sound and do something to stand out. 

Strong push marketing takes lessons from its historical failures. While casting a larger net is an essential hallmark of this Strategy, there is no need to do so blindly. The rise of SEO and SEM enables organizations to target ads more carefully. 

Concentrate on placing your ads in environments where they can be strongly interruptive. For instance, showing a new mobile video game on a local radio station is probably a waste of time and money. Instead, think about who will be receptive to your interruption and work from there.

Finally, remember that while some elements of push marketing can be outdated, many do work. For instance, BOGO deals are still top-rated for consumer products because they work. Therefore, remembering the 4 P’s is vital for this classic method of marketing strategy.

How To Make The Most Out of Pull Marketing

Pull marketing is all about the connection you make with the customer. This is nearly impossible if your customer does not know you exist. New and breakout products should consider push marketing. Once brand awareness is established, pull marketing can cut through the marketing noise and create a greater ROI for your organization.

The best pull marketing strategies have strong products, powerful content, and strong SEO. However, the best way to build a relationship with a customer is to have a genuinely good product that they want to use.  Brand loyalty is a potent force, and pull marketing leverages this. By creating a bond with a customer, an organization can create a sense of ownership. It can even generate free word-of-mouth referrals and reviews. 

The main methods to do this include interactivity and issue-solving. Build an environment where your customers can find the information that they want. Through FAQs, blog content, social media, pull marketing thrives when it enables customers a sense of control. Some other policies include subscription content. Newsletters, both physical and digital, enable customers to opt into getting information. This enables you to introduce them to new products, strengthen old ones, and maintain brand loyalty. Those who use a combined strategy can find this to be the perfect location for more conventional ads. 

Use SEO and audience segmentation to reach those with interest in your product completely. Modern search engines like Google rank genuinely valuable, relevant content. As a result, invest time and money in knowing how these rankings can work for you and your business. 

Tools for Push and Pull Marketing

Customer Relationship Management software is a powerful tool for both types of marketing, especially for pull. This kind of software is intended to help manage the complete customer lifecycle. Keeping track of all customer interactions within one system helps organizations implement a seamless customer experience.

Both kinds of marketing can benefit from better audience targeting and visibility. Search Engine Marketing software presents many of the tools required to do this. Pull marketing can harness SEO and SEM to better help involved parties find their audience and drive engagement. Push marketing can utilize this to target ads to those more likely to be receptive to them.

Google Ads and Microsoft Advertising are popular choices. Regardless of the Strategy adopted, the capacity to drive traffic to your website and rank extremely on search engine result pages can make your marketing more impactful. However, any marketing professional would agree, more vulnerability to their content is better. 

Marketing Automation is a software kind that does much of what the name suggests. By automating monotonous tasks and providing AI to assist, organizations can make better marketing performance results. In addition, growing companies can use this software to scale where conventional staffing would be useless. The ability to conduct personalization and smart audience segmentation at scale is important for marketing campaign success. 

Marketing automation can have a strong focus on analyzing user behavior and overall marketing campaign performance. Pull marketing can use this more proactively and confidently generate leads. It is a core tenant of this marketing type. Push campaigns can increase advertising volume and reach levels otherwise impossible with their existing staff size. 

Conclusion

In this post, we have seen the difference between Push vs pull marketing and how you can leverage them. Today, top multinational companies like Coca-cola, Intel, Nike, and many others effectively employ push and pull strategies. When push strategy is achieved with a well outlined and executed pull strategy, the result is phenomenal, creating consumer demand.

One such great marketing strategy is referral marketing and it acts as both push and pull marketing, as you push your existing customers to pull new customers. Referral marketing facilitates word of mouth and recommendations that leads to the expansion of your existing customer base. Earlier, word of mouth happened organically, but it’s necessary to motivate your customers to recommend or discuss your products with others in this competitive era.

If you want to make use of referral marketing, then considering InviteReferrals is a great idea.

InviteReferrals is a great referral program software that automates the referral program and allows you to have customized campaigns depending upon your needs. To know more about it, see how it works.