Need Help Marketing?

Pull marketing (also known as Inbound Marketing) is all about getting the message to your audience where and when they are listening.  Which is quite the opposite of push marketing (also known as Interruption Marketing) such as direct mail, online banner ads,  or TV commercials where you are delivering your message even when it is not solicited.

Instead with pull marketing, lead in with the prospects’ goals, concerns and values. Pull marketing is all about building brand authority, influence and visibility to achieve business goals. This marketing technique is intended to get people to seek you out, and find you simply because you have demonstrated experience in the field that you operate within and added additional value. Ultimately you want to be seen as a thought leader in your respective industry that knows what they are talking about. As long as you can get a foot in the door the prospect will be more inclined to listen later when they are looking for an “expert” in your field.

Ultimately being active with your inbound marketing strategies will ultimately help you to generate leads and establish your brand/business as a respected resource.

What can you do get pull marketing working for you?

• Start an opt-in newsletter
• Start contributing to a Blog (your own or as a guest writer on an existing blog)
• Start using Twitter as a way to connect with your prospects
• Speaking engagements have been well known to increase your exposure
• Write a column in a newspaper or trade journal
• Build a community – allow visitors to your website to interact and provide their own insights
  Examples: uservoice for encouraging customer feedback

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Key findings from a recent January 09,  HubSpot survey on Inbound Marketing found Small businesses are most aggressively allocating lead generation budgets to blogging, social media and search engine optimization.

“Realizing that inbound marketing techniques ‘level the playing field’ with the bigger budgets of larger competitors, small businesses are spending a 180% greater portion of their budgets on blogging/social media and 36% greater portion of their budgets on search engine optimization than businesses with 50 employees or more.”

SMB Lead Generation Budget Spend

Online techniques allow for cost efficiencies to compete against much larger marketing budgets. But why?

“Outbound marketing customer acquisition depends largely on the size of a company’s budget, whereas inbound marketing more heavily slants towards those businesses with the best products and services and ability to create great content.”

In the HubSpot survey they found, small businesses reported spending nearly 3X higher percentage of their lead generation budget on blogs and social media than medium-to-large businesses (14% and 5%, respectively).

On the lead generation side, small businesses spending more than 50% on inbound marketing reported a lower cost per lead, compared with medium and larger business.

What does this tell us?

If you haven’t already allocated budgets to online lead generation campaigns it is not too late to take advantage.

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