Digital Marketing can feel overwhelming and crowded. You have customers with shorter attention spans and who are bombarded with messages from every corner of the internet. How do you stand out?

First of all, you should get to know your audience. Do research, speak to others, and get perspectives on how you provide value. Before you start marketing, you should know your audience so that you can tailor your message and communication style to resonate with them directly.

The next tip is to focus on quality over quantity. It’s not a race of how much content you produce; it’s how much content you connect with your audience. This is an important and often misunderstood methodology in SEO – search engine marketing is not about the volume – it’s about creating a unique experience. If a piece of content isn’t performing to its expectation or potential, leverage data-driven insights to inform the decisions and reframe the content with a new angle or spin to help it resonate with its audience.

Now that we know our audience and we are creating unique content with high quality, let’s talk about the push and pull digital marketing tactics:

Push Tactics: Proactive Outreach

Push tactics involve actively reaching out to potential customers and grabbing their attention. Imagine tapping on someone’s shoulder and introducing them to something they never heard of before.

Here are some key digital marketing tactics:

  • Email Marketing: Targeted emails with valuable content, exclusive offers, or helpful tips can nurture leads and build brand loyalty. Personalization is critical – segment your audience and tailor your messages for maximum impact.
  • Social Media Marketing: Utilize organic posts, targeted ads, and engaging content to spark conversations and build relationships with your audience. Think of this as a friendly wave across a crowded room but with the power of laser-focused targeting.
  • Retargeting: This tactic uses cookies to follow website visitors with relevant ads based on browsing behavior. Imagine someone browsing a travel website and then seeing your ad for a specific destination they were interested in – that’s retargeting in action.

In these different modalities, you can plant the seed or idea. The user may not have been actively looking for it.

Pull Tactics: The Power of Attraction

Pull tactics focus on creating a magnetic pull that draws customers in organically. The key here is to create informative, valuable, or entertaining content that people actively seek out.

  • Search Engine Optimization (SEO): By optimizing your website and content to rank high in search results for relevant keywords, you become a beacon for users actively searching for solutions you provide. Look at how people search with keyword research. Review the metrics once you publish a post to learn more about how your audience engages with the content and if it satisfies the (search) intent.
  • Content Marketing: Create informative blog posts, articles, videos, or infographics that address your audience’s needs and pain points. Valuable content positions you as a thought leader and establishes trust with potential customers.
  • Social Media Engagement: Foster conversations, answer questions, and actively engage with your audience on social media platforms. This two-way communication builds relationships and encourages people to seek out your brand for expertise and guidance.

The Winning Combination: Push & Pull Working Together

The most effective digital marketing strategy utilizes both push and pull tactics. Push marketing can amplify your pull efforts by informing existing audiences about the valuable content you’ve created for them through SEO. Conversely, strong SEO rankings can improve the effectiveness of your push tactics by driving traffic back to your website, where targeted email opt-in forms or social media follow prompts can further build your audience.

By creating a cohesive strategy that combines push and pull tactics, you can capture the attention of potential customers at various stages of their buying journey. Remember, a data-driven approach that measures the effectiveness of each channel will allow you to optimize your marketing mix for maximum impact continuously. 

So, go forth and create a digital marketing strategy that both pushes the right message and pulls in the ideal customer!