the printing press came onto the scene, print marketing was suddenly possible. Ads like the following from 1771 appeared in early American newspapers: “James Gardner, Carpenter and Joiner, begs Leave to inform the Publick that he has opened Shop behind the Church. All Gentlemen who please to favour him with their Orders may depend upon his Punctuality, and their Business being well executed. N.B. He makes Window Sashes, on reasonable Terms.”
As time went on, the advent of radio, and later TV, meant that marketing took on new layers of sophistication. Still, the approach remained the same: a business pushing its message out to people, hoping that message was appealing enough to compel them to buy.
There were definitely benefits to marketing as it existed by the late twentieth century. Businesses had complete control over their messaging—over the way they and their product were presented. Thanks to mass media’s mass audiences, they could reach large groups of people with a single ad. Marketing collateral could be put together quickly, because looking for customer input wasn’t a step in its development. And because of this freedom to create elaborate marketing campaigns without customer feedback affecting their direction, creative marketing really could—and often did—ascend to the status of art.
But when the internet went mainstream in the 1990s, all that began to change.
Suddenly, people had choices as to the marketing material they consumed. The information they had access to wasn’t limited to what they saw in the commercials that companies decided to push at them or to what they read in ads in magazines or newspapers or on billboards—they could now take the initiative themselves to go online and research that company, its products or services, and its reputation. As an audience, they were now divided into smaller segments; they were no longer watching the same show on TV as everyone else at the same time as everyone else, or reading the same paper as everyone else each day. Cable and home video recording, and later new technology like DVRs and streaming video, allowed consumers to watch whatever they wanted, whenever they wanted. Countless different websites provided information tailored to specific interests 24/7. Instead of being advertised to whether they liked it or not, customers now gained the ability to opt in to marketing, supplying their email addresses directly to companies because they wanted to see their messages. The consumer was now in control; the company, not so much.
Faced with this sudden transformation in customer behavior and expectations, marketers found their old methods just weren’t working as well anymore. Audiences that were now accustomed to choosing which ads they received came to see the old model of marketing as intrusive, pushy, and irrelevant to their unique interests.
» The Advent of Pull Marketing
In order to tailor their methods to fit this new trend, marketers developed pull marketing, an approach that harnesses the power of internet search engines and social media to draw people in to your site rather than to a competitors’.
Before the internet, potential customers had limited resources for deciding which business to purchase a product from. Ads created by the company and in-person visits or phone calls with salespeople were the only ways to learn more about that company’s offerings—and that content, which was “pushed” at the consumer, was all tightly controlled by the company itself.
Now, however, prospective customers were free to research companies and products on their own. One way they did this was via search engines—neutral third parties where a customer might end up reading the company’s page, or its competitor’s, or even a review site. Or consumers could find out what peers thought of certain companies or products through social media, which was (and is) even harder for companies to influence than a search engine: A friend might share an experience they’d had with a business, post a link to a blog post reviewing a product, or even just “like” a company’s post or page.
Given these new ways in which consumers were finding information, companies needed to draw customers in rather than disseminate information out; they needed to make sure the company was appearing as a top choice in online searches for the types of products or services they offered. They needed to employ pull marketing.
So how did marketers accomplish this? By learning more about their customers and target audiences. Research into the phrases people actually used to search for their products online led to ever more effective ways of funneling high-quality search engine traffic to their sites. Engagement with people on social media led to clearer insight into what interested their particular audience. By looking at which posts garnered clicks, likes, and comments, marketers could fine-tune their approach. Creating content based on that information gave companies the tools to more effectively attract traffic to their site, where they could then send the brand message they wanted to convey to consumers, versus contending with the various messages consumers might receive elsewhere.
Pull marketing basically put consumers in charge of marketing. They had the power to customize the way they wanted to be marketed to, and they wanted to be marketed to only by the companies they had invited to do so, using the medium they preferred. There was no going back. Successful marketers had to embrace this new normal and cater to this new consumer expectation of control.
One example is permission-based marketing. In its earliest days, email was still considered a venue for push marketing by many companies. Companies could buy lists of email addresses online and blast out their message to thousands of recipients who might never have heard of them before. Today those sales emails would be classified as spam. The flood of unsolicited emails eventually became such a problem that Congress took action, making unsolicited mass emails illegal. Asking website visitors to opt in to marketing emails was marketers’ response to the crackdown.
The benefits to pull marketing are clear. By engaging with the audience in a two-way, personalized conversation, rather than talking to them with a one-way, generic ad, companies can deliver their message in the most effective way possible—and by taking an active role in marketing, consumers get the information they actually want and need. This two-way conversation also means companies are able to take consumer responses into consideration when planning future campaigns, making their campaigns more and more effective. All the data companies gather from engaging the consumer makes it possible to target customers more specifically.
The key difference between the two approaches? Push marketing is all about the company. Pull marketing is all about the consumer.
» Beyond Push and Pull: An Integrated Ecosystem
So what’s the problem here? Why isn’t every company happily pursuing their inbound, pull marketing plans in this new digital landscape and reaping success after success?
Because of the difficulty of engaging today’s segmented audience.
This is not your mother’s internet. It’s not just a matter of websites and email anymore. Social media is a huge and vital but constantly changing force in pull marketing—and like your audience, it’s just about as segmented as you can get. There’s Facebook and Twitter, Instagram and Pinterest and everything in between—different social media platforms preferred by people with different interests from different demographics. When companies decide to make the shift from outbound, push marketing to inbound, pull marketing, they are often at a loss as to which platforms to use.
Beyond that, many companies struggle with integrating their digital marketing efforts with their traditional ones. Isn’t it too risky, they wonder, to scrap their old marketing tactics completely, and revamp their entire approach? So instead, they just add in bits and pieces of digital where they think it might fit into their traditional strategy, or even keep the two separate, so that a misstep in one arena doesn’t affect the other.
That’s
