Marketing used to be so simple. You bought some media space and put together an ad. People saw it and some of them became customers. Or you produced a direct mail pack, sent it out and waited for the response. Or even, not so long ago, you devised an email campaign, and you got your response in minutes.
Then, suddenly, everything changed. Business decision makers stopped noticing ads. They started putting direct mail straight in the bin. They even stopped opening emails. They no longer needed these marketing communications if they wanted to buy something they could just go online to research their options and get recommendations.
At the same time as people stopped noticing push marketing, finance departments started slashing budgets. So, almost overnight, everything changed. Well, almost everything. The techniques you spent your career learning and refining no longer work, and your budgets have been decimated, but still one thing remains constant: you’re still expected to produce new leads for the sales team. That never changes.
The question you face and that a great many B2B marketers around the world also face is how on earth are you meant to do that?
The rise of pull marketing
For many the answer is pull marketing. In simple terms this is pulling prospects to you as opposed to pushing a message out to them. Broadly speaking, it involves three elements: content, distribution and promotion. Without doubt it relies heavily on content. Whether this is white papers, discount codes, event invitations, special offers, or something else, pull marketing has to be founded upon genuinely compelling content.
Until fairly recently, this content was primarily text-based. However, marketers are making increasing use of rich media such as podcasts, WebTV, and webinars/webcasts. Daryl Willcox, chairman of online PR service DWP, notes, Many shied away from video because they thought that to reflect their brand properly it would have to be near-broadcast quality. As it turns out, many people find slick video production a bit of a turn-off and that rough, medium-quality video actually comes across as very authentic.
Engaging content, properly packaged is vital, but unless people can find it, it has little marketing value. This is where the two great online phenomena of the last five years come in: search and social media. Optimise your site and your content, and potential customers will find you. Make your content good enough and your social media contacts will tell their contacts about it, they will in turn tell their contacts about it, and before you know it the pebble you dropped in the pond has come back as a tsunami of website visitors.
Yannis Marcou, MD of Skyron, says, A provocative article is not confined to the company’s website pages anymore, but can be placed as text on LinkedIn and Facebook. A video delivery can appear on YouTube, a slideshow version can be posted on SlideShare, and key components can become topics for discussions in forums, Twitter and email communities. Once there, the power of word-of-mouth can push content a lot further than the author intended. Social bookmarking, Digg, retweeting and StumbleUpon are some examples of ways that can increase the reach of the article exponentially.
Tsunami or trickle?
That is the theory anyway. The extent to which it is actually happening is a matter of considerable debate. Some dismiss pull marketing as just another fad. Others, such as Stan Woods, MD of B2B marketing agency Velocity, are convinced it is the future. Old style broadcast marketing was based on two key assumptions, he explains. Firstly, that vendors were the main source of information about products and services. Secondly, that you could reach buyers through advertising, exhibitions, direct mail and so on. Both assumptions have been fundamentally overturned by the Internet.
He continues, Audiences are massively fragmenting. The goal now is not to rent an audience that other people have created, but to build your own. Buyers now use the Internet blogs, Google, LinkedIn, Twitter to educate themselves about product categories and the vendors who operate in them. Together these two trends change the context for marketing. No one listens to people who broadcast anymore. Today it’s all about content marketing.
The shift is not immediate, and the trend is being led by smaller, technology companies. For example, Backup Direct, a 25-person provider of online back-ups to the business market, relies almost entirely on pull marketing. We have small budgets, so need to get the maximum bang for our buck, says Harry Burton, marketing executive. We write blogposts, articles and whitepapers on subjects we know interest our users. We seed these in forums and social media sites, and these generate a large number of sales leads for us.
Getting it right
For best practice, keep in mind the following guidelines:
1. It takes time: Pull marketing does indeed cost a great deal less than traditional push marketing, simply because you no longer need to buy your media. It is though considerably more time-consuming, and it is not easy to get right. Above all, successful pull marketing requires consistent effort over a period of time.
As Marcou at Skyron says, It’s easy to pay an agency to come up with a funky campaign that will peak the first week and then disappear into oblivion. Pull marketing takes time and requires personal involvement. It might take months of generating content and making it available through digital channels before the target audience takes notice and engages in meaningful conversations that will lead to sales. Often, it is much easier for a marketer to find extra budget than the time investment required to do successful pull marketing.
2. Listen: A large part of that time must be spent simply listening. Go online anlook at what people in your industry your potential customers are talking about. Monitor the Twitter feeds, lurk on forums, join LinkedIn groups, Google your products and read every blog you can find. Only by fully immersing yourself in the conversation can you add to it, to produce content that people will genuinely want.
3. Get expert help: Spend time on that content and be prepared to bring in the experts. You should know what you want to say, but how you say it is every bit as important, so supplement your skills with professional designers and developers who can create targeted landing pages, copywriters who can write with authority and verve, and web production experts who can bring it all to life in rich media. Pull marketing is cheaper than push marketing, but it’s not free.
4. Tease the sale: Hire professionals to optimise your site for the search engines, and to help you make the most of social media. Then once you have done all this, don’t give everything away at once. Take the advice of Marcel Holsheimer, VP of EMEA marketing at Unica, who is a firm believer in what he calls striptease marketing. Build trust with prospects visiting your site by requesting information from them gradually, rather than all at once, he explains.
So, if a prospect comes to the site looking to download a whitepaper, request just their email address. The next time they visit, you can request their job title and company in exchange for a trial demo.
5. Have a personality: Remain the bland, faceless company of your push marketing days and people will give you a wide berth. If, on the other hand, you can express your personality, if you can take a position and stick with it, if you can in effect build a brand, then you will find that more and more people are drawn to you. Not one or the other
The potential is enormous, but it is important not to get carried away. As already observed, the change is gradual, and there is still a place for broadcast techniques. Antony Miller, head of media development at Royal Mail, is keen to make this point, saying, The growth of pull marketing certainly doesn’t signal the end of the road for push techniques.
Royal Mail research has shown that people are more likely to click on a search link for a company if they’ve already received something from the organisation in the post.
In fact, few observers are claiming that pull marketing will ever completely replace push marketing. Most believe that the two will work together. As Kevan Lawton, chief marketing officer of marketing company Kyp, concludes, In B2B marketing, you cannot just sit back and wait for the leads to come to you; marketers need to proactively ensure that the target audience is gaining enough exposure to the message to intrigue them to seek out more. Using push and pull marketing techniques in isolation is not enough. The two must be combined.
Pull marketing is then best seen as an additional technique for the marketer to use. It is powerful, but is even more so when combined with push techniques. This new technique does nothing to simplify the life of a B2B marketer it requires a radically new mindset, and with every day that passes there is new technical data to take on board but it does offer a way for us to keep generating those leads, to keep delivering value to the business, to keep doing what marketers need to do.
