Marketing is one of the most powerful and effective techniques to offer your startup optimal visibility and propel it to a scalable height. 

Regardless of your startup’s marketing strategy, niche marketing, email marketing, influencer marketing, just to mention a few, all fall into two broad categories: pull marketing or push marketing. The difference between push and pull marketing primarily lies in how you approach customers. Still, there is a lot more. 

Understanding the core differences between these two marketing principles will go a long way in ensuring your startup adopts the right strategy to achieve its marketing goal.

This article elucidates more on push and pull marketing, examples of each, and when to use them. 

Push marketing

A push marketing strategy or outbound marketing refers to companies’ techniques to take their products/services to consumers. Firms prioritize ‘pushing’ products to consumers intending to create vast awareness to the consumers about their products and benefits. 

The chief objective of push marketing is to use various advertisement techniques to send communication and marketing to the right target audience, sometimes right at the point of purchase. As a result, push marketing is a deliberate and proactive marketing strategy. In addition, it’s ideal for targeting new leads and customers, reaching an audience that isn’t aware of your startup’s existence.  

Building and nurturing relationships with customers is a top priority for most organizations. In contrast, push marketing prioritizes gleaning immediate sales over a short period in lieu of fostering relationships that create brand loyalty. 

Prevalent forms of push marketing include targeted emailing, line of sight, and television or radio advertisements. For example, department stores that sell fragrance lines tend to leverage push marketing where a new perfume brand offers sale incentives to a department store that sells its products. 

In brief, push marketing is perfect for creating rapid results and making solid impressions on prospective customers. It cuts the need for branding and quickly promotes a new product/service. 

Pull marketing

As the name gives it away, an inbound marketing strategy or pull marketing focuses on firms increasing the demand of their products and pulling consumers to the product. This technique prioritizes increasing the number of consumers who want to buy your startup’s products/services. 

Pull marketing aims to make consumers actively seek a product, consequently getting retailers stocking up on the product to meet the direct consumer demand. Brands reach out to their target audience through direct marketing campaigns to get the customers to come to them, hence the term pull marketing. 

Pull marketing is ideal when the target audience has a long lead time to weigh in alternatives. As a result, it’s more practicable for them to make an astute decision without being pressured. 

For your startup, this means that it’s vital to convince customers that they have to buy your advertised products by creating top-value content. In short, you are basically convincing your target audience to seek out your product/services on their own accord instead of directly targeting them. When leveraged at its best, the demand for a product will most likely exceed the supply when pull marketing is used. 

There are various techniques for firms to reach their target audience through pull marketing. Word of mouth, social media marketing, partnering with a related website, and search engine optimization are prevalent forms of pull marketing. 

For instance, a firm spends many years advertising its product, and as a result, it becomes a powerhouse that clients come to with little or no advertising needed. In contrast, to push marketing, pull marketing establishes brand identity and builds a loyal customer base. 

Push vs. pull marketing: the differences

Push and pull marketing seems to be about exact opposites. Push marketing prioritizes generating sales and getting more rapid conversions. On the other hand, pull marketing focuses on your existing clientele and some new customers to perfect and maximize awareness of your brand, so that leads seek you out. 

Push marketing aims to communicate product information before a consumer, while pull marketing prioritizes creating awareness, consequently making it easier for consumers to locate you. As a result of the concept and strategy of these models, push marketing is ideally executed either as traditional advertising such as newspapers, billboard ads, TV, or radio ads. In contrast, pull marketing is primarily online, for instance, SEO blog and website content that links to landing pages. 

Also, the goal behind push marketing is to make a sale promptly, while pull marketing focuses on building and nurturing relationships over time and often from scratch. 

Strengths and benefits of push marketing

Instances when push marketing can be helpful include:

• When creating a sales channel, your startup is seeking distributors to aid product promotion. 
• When creating product exposure, product demand, and consumer awareness about your products/services, especially when launching new products. 
• Push marketing is effective in generating rapid cash flows and sales. 
• During holidays and seasonal events. 
• When expanding to a new industry or when operating within a niche market. 

It would be best not to consider push marketing if your startup’s utmost priority at the moment is merely engagements or awareness. Also, initial push marketing efforts tend to be expensive. 

Strengths and benefits of pull marketing

Pull marketing might be the perfect fit for your startup to bolster its brand awareness and build its reputation. It creates higher engagement levels since it’s vast. Other instances when pull marketing might come in handy include: 

• When focusing on creating brand equity and product value. 
• When testing your products’ acceptance in the market and obtaining consumer feedback. 
• Establishing direct contact with your customer base and building customer loyalty. 
• Ensuring long-term business growth. 
• Keeping dominance in your industry. 
• Enhancing social media traffic and engagements. In addition, pull marketing helps grow traffic to your startup’s site across organic, referral, and social segments.
• Since consumers primarily seek your products, there is less pressure to conduct outbound marketing. 

Push vs. pull marketing: which is best for your startup

Ultimately, the fitting model for your startup comes down to whether there is strong demand for what it offers, whether you are aware of how to reach your clientele at the point of sale, and in general, your overall objectives.

Also, your startup’s industry is a crucial consideration. For instance, incorporating both models in B2B marketing will yield optimal results. Also, when you want to increase sales while enhancing your brand’s awareness, it would be best to use both strategies in tandem. All in all, both push and pull marketing are effective techniques that can have an immense ROI impact on your growing venture.