Push Marketing = TV ads, newspaper ads, signs, flyers, door knocking and cold calling and all the other manners of yelling for a customer to buy something.
People generally hate being Push Marketed these days. We’re completely jaded by it. Ever buy a Sunday paper? Ever just scooped up the entire inch thickness of advertising crap and dumped it into the trash?
Push Marketing = Doesn’t Work Anymore.
Enter Pull Marketing…
Pull Marketing = It’s a conversation with a customer. It’s not saying “this is what we have now buy it”. It’s saying “what do you need? How can we help?” It’s drawing the customer in with information, assistance and attention to the forms of modern politeness.
Blogs are just great at Pull Marketing. Blogs are not a sales pitch and are naturally conversational.
Pull Marketing = Very Soft Selling that works.
However…
If you are a new business that no one knows about, Pull Marketing doesn’t seem to work very well. No one knows you exist to be drawn in by the gravitational field of your conversation and product.
So in order for you not to be completely invisible, you have to get out and do some Push Marketing. Maybe even Push Marketing about your Pull Marketing platform.
Which makes no sense at all. Because Pull Marketing platforms are based on the idea that Push Marketing doesn’t work.
Dang it. What would Seth Godin do? Both? Neither? Help!
For example I would love Seth Godin to actually comment on this blog, but I strongly suspect he doesn’t know it exists. So writing in hope that he will be magically pulled into leaving a comment is pointless. So I’m going to push market him by emailing him this post. Which is probably very rude and somewhat annoying to Seth and won’t work anyway. But I’ve got no other option that might work.
This is hard.
Travis Martinez
January 10, 2008 at 9:38 pm
Great Post! I hope Seth comments. In doing my business planning for this year I am trying to have a happy medium between pull and push marketing but I try and push all interest to my websites where most of my pull marketing happens.
Scoot
January 14, 2008 at 6:39 pm
I don’t believe you have to push to get recognized. Sell yourself first, it’ll take time, but then you won’t be able to keep up with all the business you have. Be good to people, take care of them long enough, and it’ll always comes back.
Ive only had my license a year, (so consider the source) but in a market where Realtors are dropping like flies, I’ve had the opportunity to prove this to myself on a daily basis.
————-IMHO——————!