Push marketing is where a company pushes it’s products to it’s consumers. Since the beginning of marketing, push marketing has been the vehicle that has dominated the marketing landscape. With push marketing, you don’t know who exactly who your customers are so you have to shotgun your advertising, TV, magazines, billboards.
With social networking sites, that is starting to change. The companies that understand will not be the only ones to survive but I dare say that they will be the ones that will thrive.
Yesterday I passed a house in a newer neighborhood where someone understands pull marketing. In front of their newly prepared landscaping was a big piece of plywood with a sign painted in bright orange “Need Sprinklers”. Using pull marketing to make the sprinkler providers/contracters come to them. I would wager that they are also using social networking sites to find things get found online.
My wife and I decided that we need a new family doctor that is closer to home. Immediately my wife turned to Facebook. In less than a day we not only had a lot of referrals to choose from, we had a competition going on. It’s basically down to 2 family practices and we’re letting our Facebook friends fight out which one is the better choice. If one of those practices were to join the conversation they would no doubt win my vote.
I’ve seen the same thing on Twitter, someone looking for a cloud based PBX system for personal use, someone looking for a flexible enterprise CMS, someone looking for the best WordPress plugin for this or that.
Only once have I seen a company that is capitalizing on the new mentality. Someone complained about the speed of an internet service she uses on twitter and within an hour she had a response back from a support person at said company saying that he was addressing her issue. It wasn’t a big enough issue for her to talk to tech support but it was enough of an issue to tell her friends. And now we all know about this cool new service with awesome customer service.
That’s what pull marketing is all about.
This company is monitoring the networks for mentions of their brand and products and when something pops up that could do damage, or when an opportunity arises they jump on it, turning negative press into positive press. Right there, that is enough reason for me to check these guys out. I probably never would have paid enough attention to them but now I have and now I know that they would be a perfect thing for us to use. In fact, they could solve one of our biggest problems in online reputation management for a specific client.
Effective marketing? Yes. Expensive advertising? No. Am I already sold? Yes. And have they ever talked to me? No.
Tell me what marketing or sales department wouldn’t like to experience that.
