Push vs. Pull Marketing: Which Strategy Is Right for Your Business?

In business, just like in everything else, balance is important.

Push marketing and pull marketing are two complementary strategies businesses use for generating leads and growing a company. Understanding and effectively implementing both methods can improve your marketing efforts.

Keep reading to discover how these strategies work and how you can use them to boost your business growth.

Push Marketing vs. Pull Marketing: What's the Difference?

As the name suggests, push marketing "pushes" messaging out to your target audience. You are essentially sending them information and content directly. This is also known as outbound marketing. (E.g. A jewelry company sends an email announcing a flash sale on gemstone rings to its customer database.)

In contrast, pull marketing aims to draw, or "pull," your audience in by creating valuable content that persuades them to seek you out. It can also be referred to as inbound marketing. (E.g. The company publishes a blog post on its website with cleaning tips for different gemstones and metals in an effort to attract potential customers to its site.)

Over the past decade, pull marketing has become more popular on the internet, with 59% of sales teams preferring it to outbound marketing. Still, push marketing maintains its place in more traditional formats.

It’s also important to note that push marketing and pull marketing aren't an either/or proposition. The techniques can be used together or on their own, depending on your business needs and budget. No matter how you’re using these strategies, it pays to understand the nuances of each one.

Push Marketing

The key to effective push marketing is getting your brand in front of potential new customers and spreading your message far and wide. You're aiming to grab attention, pique interest, and spur action. To do that, you'll need the right vehicle to carry your marketing communications.

There are a few mediums for push marketing, including:

• Email Marketing: Sending emails to subscribers announcing new products or promotions.
• Online/Offline Advertising: Purchasing ad space on websites, social media, TV, radio, etc.
• Billboards: Placing attention-grabbing billboards in high-traffic areas.
• Flyers/Posters: Distributing printed promotional materials.

A great example of push marketing is YouTube ads. Even if we haven't searched for a particular product, these ads still appear, promoting brands, products, and services to us. With push marketing, a brand is aiming to get our attention, whether we like it or not.

When to Use Push Marketing

While some marketers see push marketing as outdated, it still has practical uses today. Here are some scenarios when a company might choose to use push marketing to win new clients or retain its existing ones:

Entering New Markets

When entering a new market, businesses may not have much brand recognition or an established customer base. Push marketing allows you to get your messaging out to potential new customers.

Selling Unique Products

If you have a very specific, unique, or innovative product, you can't always rely on customers finding you organically. Push marketing is useful for announcing new products rather than waiting for target customers to stumble upon them themselves. It's especially useful if you're first to market.

Having a Very Specific Audience

When you have a niche target market, push strategies let you zone in on the exact right prospect profile. You can focus your budget on the few channels where your audience gathers, rather than spreading it too thin.

Having an Offline Audience

Pull marketing often relies on online platforms, which makes it less effective for offline audiences. Push marketing can better reach audiences that are offline through channels like TV, radio, print ads, billboards, and more.

Successful Push Marketing in Action: Barack Obama’s Presidential Campaign

During Barack Obama's 2012 re-election campaign, his team used a unique push marketing strategy through fundraising emails. These emails had intriguing subject lines like "Join me for dinner?" or "Can we meet for dinner sometime soon?" They encouraged recipients to donate $5 or more, which automatically entered them into a raffle to win dinner with the President.

This push tactic worked incredibly well. The Obama administration was able to raise over $690 million online during his campaign, mostly through these fundraising emails. The intriguing subject lines enticed people to open the emails, and the unique dinner raffle incentive motivated many to donate.

Pros and Cons of Push Marketing

Now that you understand push marketing, it’s time to move on to its counterpart, pull marketing.

Pull Marketing

If push marketing requires vehicles to deliver your message, pull marketing requires platforms to attract and engage audiences. In fact, 90% of organizations market with content.

Some top platforms for pull marketing include:

• SEO: Your website is the best platform to which you can hope to attract clients. Having an informative, keyword-rich website that ranks well in search engine results pages helps pull in organic traffic.

• Social Media Marketing: Platforms like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and TikTok are ideal for pull marketing. You can build an engaged community by sharing fun, interesting, or educational posts that establish your authority.

• Affiliates/Partnerships: Getting others to promote your brand to their audiences can pull in highly qualified traffic.

• Word-of-Mouth Marketing: Positive referrals, online reviews, testimonials, and buzz help attract new visitors.

For example, investing in SEO optimization helps attract visitors who are already searching for topics related to your business. Likewise, entertaining social media content attracts visitors who get value from your posts and engage further with your brand as a result.

When to Use Pull Marketing

In general, pull marketing should be a core part of your promotional strategy if you're doing business online. Inbound marketing is particularly powerful in these situations:

You're a Small or Medium-Sized Enterprise (SME)

When you're a small or medium-sized business, every penny of your marketing budget counts. Since inbound marketing costs 61% less than outbound, it can be a great way to make a big impact on a small budget. Creating organic content is much more affordable to maintain than a massive media spend. Plus, once you have an organic audience, it costs pennies to maintain compared to continually buying search or social media ad space.

You're Looking For Brand Awareness

Push campaigns might convince someone to buy your product, but that doesn't mean they'll remember your brand name tomorrow or develop any sense of loyalty. Pull marketing builds awareness and affinity for your brand organically over time.

Your Customer Journey Is Complex

If converting a lead into a buyer requires extensive research or multiple touchpoints, pull marketing is ideal. You provide valuable content until they are ready to purchase.

You Depend on Repeat Business

Since pull marketing increases customer loyalty, it helps ensure repeat business and lifetime value from happy customers. Depending on the industry, acquiring a new customer can cost anywhere from five to 25 times more than selling to an existing one. And 59% of Americans say that once they’re loyal to a brand, they’re loyal for life!

Successful Pull Marketing in Action: Preply’s Content Marketing Strategy

One prime example of using pull marketing well is Preply, an online language tutoring site that grew from 500,000 to 3.8 million monthly visitors in a matter of three years. Preply achieved this impressive organic growth through an extensive pull marketing strategy that spanned across 60,000 pages, an unusually high number for most sites.

These pages strategically targeted different parts of the customer journey. This included a blog with optimized SEO that attracts 1.9 million monthly visitors, interactive forums generating user-driven content engaging 850,000 visitors, and service pages that convert 1 million monthly visitors into customers.

Pros and Cons of Pull Marketing

Combining Push and Pull Marketing

The most effective approach is to combine both forms of marketing. Push marketing enables you to get in front of new audiences right away. You can then leverage pull marketing to keep them coming back for more.

For example, a hotel might buy a push display ad campaign targeting cold audiences to promote an upcoming sale. They would then use pull marketing like email nurturing and retargeting site visitors with valuable, personalized content to convert leads over time.

The initial push gets attention fast, while the pull sustains interest and leads customers through the buying journey. Together, push and pull marketing feed into each other to drive greater results.

Bottom Line

As we've seen from this post, the main difference between push and pull marketing is that push marketing involves actively seeking potential customers' attention, while pull marketing attracts customers with valuable content. Neither is inherently better. A balanced mix is ideal for most businesses.

Of course, sustaining any marketing program requires the right tools for tracking, measuring, and engaging with your audience. From email automation to SEO research to social media management, modern software platforms handle the day-to-day details so you can focus on the big picture.

Solutions like Softailed's Software Comparison Tool and Best Picks make it easy to find the right platforms for push and pull marketing success. Try them out today to get started on the path to marketing growth!