As much as you might want to broadcast your brand to the whole world as aggressively as possible, sometimes letting the world come to you can work even better. Pull marketing, which draws interested parties to your online presence through their own search efforts, has certain advantages over push marketing (the aggressive pushing of a product or service to a wide audience). Here are four of them.

1. Qualified Leads Instead of Cold Calls

The great thing about pull marketing is that your prospective customers find you as a result of their active search for the solution to their problem or desire. That means they're ready to buy whatever that solution turns out to be.

If someone searching the Web for diet advice happens upon a useful article by your nutritional counseling center, that person is already predisposed to contact you for more answers -- and possibly a consultation, coaching session, or your flagship line of vitamins. Qualified leads like this are worth their weight in gold compared to random cold calls to a largely uninterested general public.

2. Open 24 Hours

If you want to sell a fantastic new product, it makes perfect sense to utilize push marketing techniques such as incentivizing major retailers to set up fancy in-store displays. TV, mailings, cold calls, and radio ads can also spread the word to a large audience in a hurry. But all of these methods are limited by the availability of their channels. When your retailer closes its doors for the night or the local TV or radio station signs off, you're done advertising until tomorrow.

Meanwhile, the post office only delivers once a day, and don't even think about cold calling people after a certain hour. Pull marketing, however, is passively open to the public at the public's convenience, 24 hours a day. If your prospective customer feels like searching for what you offer and downloading your eBook or reading your blog at 3 in the morning, that's just great. You can get a lot more business when your marketing tools are open for business round the clock! 

3. Deeper Branding Opportunities

Because pull marketing tends to happen online, it naturally generates some extraordinarily useful information in the form of readily accessible engagement metrics. The right array of analytic tools can reveal which channels your visitors are using to find you, how long they spend on your articles or web pages, and at precisely which point they decided to take the desired action or drop out.

You can then use all this data to help refine your strategies and content, adjusting here and tweaking there until you get optimal results. While you can obtain metrics from push marketing efforts as well, it can be much trickier to figure out where those outbound sales are coming from and where you might need to improve things.

4. Lower Upfront Costs

Although push marketing can be a good way for a new company or product to make a big initial splash, that impact can come with a big initial price tag. The setup costs of all those point-of-sale displays, retailer incentives, trade shows, and mass media campaigns can really take a big chunk out of a small or young company's budget, especially when you consider the lesser effectiveness of throwing your message to a relatively diffuse audience.

Pull marketing costs money too, of course, because you have to pay for content creation and website/SEO/social media management. But these costs tend to be more spread out in the form of recurring expenses, which can put less of dent in your financials. The most powerful of all forms of marketing, word of mouth referrals, happens to be the cheapest by far -- and social media sharing is a huge part of getting those conversations started.

Pull marketing is a great way
to generate word of mouth.

But even though pull marketing has its advantages, that doesn't mean you should abandon push marketing. A well-rounded marketing approach incorporates a blend of both methods. Emails based on social media likes, webinars that offer coupons, and blog article teasers aimed at purchased lead lists are just a few ways you can combine push and pull marketing to enjoy the best -- and most profitable -- of both worlds. Xzito can pave the way by showing you how to build your online and offline marketing channels into an integrated "success engine." Contact us to find out how we can help you.