5 Key Elements of a Winning Pull Marketing Strategy

As you might expect from the term, pull marketing is any kind of marketing that attempts to attract prospects onto the buyer’s journey. For example, generating prospects through ebooks, white papers, infographics, targeted social media content, and through SEO are all forms of pull marketing. Pull marketing is almost exclusively an online process, since it leverages the web and automation.

Push marketing, on the other hand, is marketing that reaches out to prospects, and targets them with specific content. Typically, push marketing is an offline strategy, and can involve print and display ads, radio and TV advertising, advertorials in magazines, and so on.

Creating a Winning Pull Marketing Strategy

So now that you know what pull marketing is and how it differs from push marketing, the next big question is: how do you make pull marketing work? The answer is to create a winning pull marketing strategy. Here are 5 key elements to keep in mind:

1. Understand Who You Need to Reach and Why

You can’t afford to guess or assume what your target audiences care about. Instead, you need to research and analyze, and use these insights to build buyer personas. Unfortunately, unlike the Field of Dreams: “if you build it, they won’t come”.

2. Understand Where You’ll Make a Connection

Identifying the right channels is a vital, yet often overlooked of a successful pull marketing strategy. For example, business and professional-level target audiences are more likely to be engaged on LinkedIn than Instagram (or in some cases, the opposite may be true!).

3. Craft Content Based on the Who, Why and Where

Once you know who you need to reach, why you need to reach them (i.e. why they care to be reached), and where they can be found, the next step is to craft original, compelling content that starts the conversation. The mix can include ebooks, blog posts, articles, white papers, infographics, reports, and so on. Tapping internal resources is important here as well. As noted by SearchEngineJournal.com: “To generate content, you also need to consider how to identify and utilize the intellectual property and specialist knowledge within your business. This is your unique content asset and applying it right will help raise your profile as an industry leader.”

Also, it goes without saying – but we’ll say it anyway – that mediocre or run-of-the-mill content won’t work here. Customers are smart, picky and inundated with content from all kinds of businesses. If yours doesn’t stand out for all of the right reasons, it might as well not exist.

4. Bring them Home!

Once a connection is made, it’s important to drive prospects to a landing page or other destination that is going to move them forward on the buyer’s journey. Or, the call-to-action can be to call and setup a demo, consultation, or something else. All that matters is that prospects don’t have to ask themselves “what’s next?”

5. Track, Analyze and Optimize

Last but not least, track and analyze the pull marketing strategy to optimize performance. For example, you may discover that certain types of content are generating more traction than others, or certain landing pages have higher conversion rates. Paying attention to what’s working – and just as importantly, what’s not – helps you make changes that pave the shortest path to sustainable ROI.