Below is an interesting article I read about Pull Marketing. With the increase in technology, it is important for Staffing Firms to employ these new techniques.
Pull marketing is the science of attracting leads and sales rather than applying more work-heavy traditional ‘push’ marketing approaches. In an increasingly tough marketplace, pull marketing is overtaking push marketing as the most effective way to drive business.
This important change has taken place for several important reasons:
Reason #1: Buying Behavior Has Changed for Good
The Internet and social media revolution means that buyer behavior has changed forever. Globally, we conduct 88 billion searches a month on Google. That converts into 57 percent of Internet users who search the Web every day, 46 percent of which are searches for information on products or services, while 20 percent of monthly searches on Google are for local businesses.
Reason #2: The Upgrade of Search
Internet search has changed significantly in a very short space of time. Continuous upgrades to the search engines mean that search is now faster, more relevant, and more targeted than ever before.
Reason #3: The Rise of Social Media
The growth of social media follows closely behind the exponential development of the Web and is the leading emerging channel for lead generation since 2010. By 2014, social networking services are anticipated to replace email as the primary vehicle for interpersonal communications for 20 percent of business users (Source: Gartner, Inc).
The Pull Marketing Funnel
To reap all the potential rewards of pull marketing, you need to create an effective pull marketing funnel. This is the pipeline that will actively attract (pull) in leads and sales and help to reduce the effort involved with traditional push marketing approaches.
The Top
Capture: This stage is focused on capturing and attracting potential new leads. It involves applying advanced technology and social media to learn exactly where your potential customers are talking and what they are talking about—and to be aware of the conversations people are having about you, your competitors or your industry.
Then you can develop and nurture online communities of people who are actively interested in your kind of product or service. The best way to access all this invaluable market information is to listen.
The Internet is the first place 78 percent of Web users go to when they’re thinking of buying a product or service. Listening means applying advanced technology and social media to find out exactly where your potential customers are talking, whether that’s on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, or on other platforms.
This is the stage of identifying the most effective sources of leads and creating mechanisms for attracting them, with effective, targeted content. Having drawn prospects in with informative, expertise-led content, you ensure that you have effective mechanisms in place to gather their information.
The Middle
Nurture: The middle of your pull marketing funnel is focused on nurturing your leads—those connections you have made at the Capture stage. This phase is based on the understanding that you’re designing your marketing approach and content around your customers’ buying cycle, rather than enforcing your selling cycle on them.
This means staying in contact with your audience with content that meets their particular level of interest, but strengthening your profile gradually with them as an expert and trusted source. You then move on to converting these warmed up leads into sales prospects and then into customers.
Creating new leads at the middle of the funnel centers on the strategic use of targeted and compelling content to create and reinforce a relationship with potential leads and customers. This content should directly target the demand you have identified through the listening stage to reflect the buying cycle in your potential customers to ensure that the right information reaches the right leads at the right time. It includes online content such as:
- Articles
- Blogs
- White papers
This is the stage where you engage in a conversation with your potential customers by building an audience for your products or services. So, you need to get your content published, promoted, and distributed through social media channels, industry websites, online communities, forums, and Internet PR channels.
The vital thing is getting your content seen—and noticed—in all the right places. It’s also about knowing which marketing platforms your potential customers use and connecting and conversing with them through these as effectively as possible.
Next, you transform—managing the evolution of a lead into a customer, or, to put it more simply, helping people move from thinking about buying your product or service to actually buying your product or service. This important step involves turning your ongoing conversations into leads and those leads into opportunities and new customers. You do this by tracking and tapping into your customer’s buying cycle with lead management, lead scoring, and lead nurturing.
Questions about these new marketing technique, contact us. We can walk you through these new strategies.
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