Is SEO Push or Pull Marketing?

When building a campaign, it is important to decide whether to use Push or Pull marketing in your approach. Push and pull marketing may be seen as opposites, but the two methods work in synergy with each other. In the world of digital marketing, SEO draws in potential customers to find what they are looking for all the while pushing your website to the top of search results for them to discover. SEO is an excellent strategy to naturally make your target audience aware of your business and allows you to create brand awareness without being forceful. With these forces at play, where does SEO fit in between push and pull marketing?

Push vs. Pull Marketing Strategies

First, here’s the low down on the differences between push and pull marketing.

Push marketing informs the audience about a product or service, which can lead to quicker sales through advertising. This type of promotional strategy allows brands to ‘push’ their products and services directly to the customer. By ‘pushing’ your product to your target audience through ads and campaigns, you are ultimately creating demand for the product by raising brand awareness.

Some examples of when push marketing is implemented include:

• Launching a new business without established brand recognition

• App notifications alerting audience about discounts, new product releases, sales and deals

• Trade show promotions

• Radio, TV, email, direct mail, pay per click advertising

• Promoting sales, campaigns and offers that run on a limited time

• During big holidays and seasonal events

Pull marketing aims to ‘pull’ prospecting, in-market audiences to your brand. Advertisers ‘pull’ consumers into converting by increasing brand recognition and trust by positioning themselves into the top position on a search engine results page (SERP). In-market audiences are defined as a category of web users that have a high commercial intent, meaning they are actively looking for a particular product or service.

Pull marketing is useful in these circumstances:

• Maintaining a dominant position in specific niches or industries

• Building a return customer base or improving brand loyalty

• Promoting brand recognition with customer engagement and visibility

• Growing social media traffic and engagement

• Drawing traffic to your website

In short, push marketing presents your product in front of the customer, while pull marketing draws consumers to your offering by remaining top of mind.

What is SEO?

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation and is a practice used to help a website rank high on a search engine like Google or Bing. The aim of SEO is to enhance visibility of a website so it becomes easier to find when users search certain keywords or phrases. When a website’s content, technical configuration and backlinks are optimised and work in synergy with each other, search engines give the site a higher ranking on the search engine page.

SEO best practices include using relevant keywords in titles, meta descriptions, page copy and URLs. These efforts improve a site’s ranking, enhance user search experience and show content that matches what the consumer is searching for.

Where does SEO fit in?

Traditionally, SEO marketing was a way to ‘push’ the content of an existing website into search engines and execute tactics to improve its rank. However, SEO is now used to expand brand visibility in organic search results. SEO allows businesses to direct their content, web pages and other services to their target audience who are looking for a specific product or service.

Optimised content makes it easier for prospective customers to discover your business organically and find what they are searching for. Research shows people choose to click on organic results more than they do paid ads, even though the latter comes first on SERPs. SEO has been proven to be an effective type of marketing strategy as it has a reliable return on investment, allowing you to optimise your brand and improve its positioning and visibility overtime.

What Strategy is Right for Your Business?

A combination of push and pull tactics will give you the best results. Both marketing channels have its benefits and implementing both push and pull strategies are effective ways to grow your business and create brand awareness.

Unsure if a single or multi channel strategy is for you? Soup’s specialists can help you figure out if push and/or pull marketing will be most effective in achieving your business KPIs.

Soup Agency offers a range of bespoke digital marketing services tailored to your business needs. Speak to a specialist today about creating a strategy that works for you.