The move from the ‘Push’ to ‘Pull’ model of marketing communications

You are here:

Dave Chaffey and Grant Le Boff discuss the most effective techniques for getting seen online using inbound marketing

The Internet Age has transformed marketing. Marketers need to move from broadcast mode to instead capturing micro-moments. The level of competition means that marketers have to be smart and agile to make the most of inbound marketing opportunities that exploit ‘Pull’ marketing techniques, in particular SEO. By leveraging data they can discover ways to get themselves seen at the exact moment customers are searching for products which they provide.

Getting insights from data about inbound marketing techniques and turning those insights into actions isn’t easy since it’s become highly competitive. Here Dave Chaffey and Grant Le Boff discuss approaches for exploiting the move from the Push to Pull model of communications. Thanks to Grant’s Sticky Marketing Club for filming and producing this video!

If you can’t watch the video, take a look at the transcript:

Grant Leboff: Dave, one of the things you talk about in Digital Marketing, is how we change from going from ‘push to pull’ and I would like you to explain that a little bit more for us?

Dave Chaffey: I think that when we saw the start of the web, it was the biggest transformation that we had and it is still very important today. So if you want to get visible online – and of course there is so much competition – it is really important to be there when people are searching for your products or services, whether they are looking for a camera or to join a gym, for example, if you can get that visibility in Google or perhaps on Facebook, as people are looking for recommendations from friends, you’re there at that moment. When people are looking for information, Google are calling those moments and they are trying to get marketers to think more in terms of getting visibility at those moments of buying or reviewing.

Grant Leboff: So how does a marketing team, or an owner of a business, start to think like that? I think people still have this broadcast mentality don’t they? Even now, when they go online and when they want to shout at everybody and tell them that they’ve arrived. So how do you change that mindset?

Dave Chaffey: That’s a good question! I think people do take a long time to change and I think it’s about looking for the opportunity from digital. With Google, they have their keyword planner tools. For anything else, whether it’s the camera or the health club example, you can see the number of people searching and the range of terms that they are looking for. That will show you the demands, and that’s the opportunity, in terms of clicks through, to a website and you can benchmark against competitors to see what they are doing.

Grant Leboff: Once you use the keyword tool, for example, and you can see the opportunities, what would be the next step for a business where I can see the words on which people are searching and ones that perhaps they are not? What would you do next with those words?

Dave Chaffey: That’s right, you do a gap analysis where you can see where the biggest opportunities are, but those will often be where there is competition already. So sometimes it’s best to be smart and look at where you are a bit under the radar; a niche term. I think with many businesses new to digital marketing and search engine optimization, they are very attracted by these numbers, but they can be quite disappointed, so it is unlikely that you are going to be able to get straight in there and say, rank for digital cameras, that’s just not going to happen.

You can rank for a particular niche, whether it’s reviews or new models that are coming out, so through being a bit more agile and creative you can get your name out there.

Grant Leboff: Would you recommend businesses to do that? To start going niche and not thinking in more general terms where the competition is going to be immense?

Dave Chaffey: Yes that’s right. With my business, Smart Insights, we are all about digital marketing advice but I don’t really try and compete on a two-term phrase like digital marketing because Wikipedia will be the top ranking for that. Whereas if you look at say, three word phrases around practical tools which our audience is looking for, you will see that we are quite visible there. So if you like, it’s not the two word phrases, it’s the three, four, five word phrases that will work.

So this is when People talk about the long tail. So it’s working out those consumers’ searching behaviours or the way people search in businesses, then try getting visibility for that. In most websites that I’ve seen, regardless of the size of the company, this long tail factor is really important and if you’ve got a lots of pages, the majority won’t be through to the homepage, they will be through to deeper blog posts.

From our sponsors: The move from the ‘Push’ to ‘Pull’ model of marketing communications