10 Good Push Pull Marketing Strategies

If you’re talking about the marketing industry, then at some point you’ve got to start talking about promotion. The best product or service that the world has ever seen won’t see the light of day without some successful promotions behind it. You could use a push strategy or your could use a pull strategy, but the best marketing strategies are those that combine these two schools of thought.

In short, a push marketing strategy is more geared toward generating more sales. A pull strategy is orientated towards the actual marketing that is required. If you’re using push pull marketing strategies, then you’re using a combination of both! That’s what you’re going to find in the strategies below.

Push Pull Strategies that Work

1. Get Your Product Out There
People aren’t going to want your product if they can’t see it, feel it, or try it out in some way. That’s why getting a new product out to the people in its purest form is often one of the best marketing strategies there is. Go out to trade shows so that you can do product demonstrations. Combine this with advertising that works with your specific market segments that you’ve targeted so that you can really generate some excitement.

2. Get Face to Face
If you want a way to market to people on a 1:1 basis, then you’ve got to bring people in so they can see what you’ve got first hand. Get them into your store or onto your website and sell to them directly. You can encourage this by advertising specials on specific items, having promotional displays outside of your physical location, or even through something as basic as good word-of-mouth advertising.

3. Always Negotiate
When your product is on a lot of different store shelves, you’ve developed a method of push marketing that works passively. The items will advertise themselves and tempt people into a purchase when they have a need that your product can specifically solve. The only trick to this specific strategy is that you’ve got to constantly negotiate with retailers about product placement. Items that are in the direct line of a consumer’s sight are more likely to be purchased because they’re seen to have value. Low shelf items are seen as discounted and cheap. Upper shelf items are seen as premium, high quality items. Where do you want your products to be?

4. What Does Your Packaging Say?
The packaging of your products can push and pull people at the same time. The text and images on the packaging can be specifically designed to speak volumes about the satisfaction that someone will receive. Even value statements like “We have 40% more product for the same price!” By knowing that you do provide more value, they’ll actively seek out your packaging because you’ve been able to get the consumer to come to your product.

5. Do You Have a Point of Sale?
Those point of sale displays in the middle of an aisle get to be annoying, but they are effective. You’ll also see point of sale displays in windows and on sidewalks in front of a store. You’ll see them online with ecommerce websites like Amazon who promote a specific premium item, like the Amazon Fire, immediately above the fold when the home page is pulled up. Put the products you want to push in a way that interrupts someone’s attention for just a moment and you’ll be able to improve the brand recognition of that product.

6. Manage the Relationship
In order for any push pull marketing strategy to be effective, you’ve got to manage the relationships with your customers in such a way that they’ll want to come back. It’s not just the product that has value to each customer. It’s the value that they see you placing on the B2C relationship that holds a lot of importance to them. That’s why someone will go to the local hardware store and pay $3 more for a tool over the national discount chain.

7. Offer a Discount
Nothing is simpler than putting a product on sale so that you can increase the value that is seen in the product. Sales need to be of a certain amount, however, for them to be effective. A 5% sale isn’t going to draw a lot of attention, especially on an item that’s $5 or less. If you can make a sale be 20%, then you might start to see some action.

8. Establish a Chain of Supply
You’ve got to walk a careful line between scarcity and price to make a push pull marketing campaign work effectively. People need to believe that there isn’t much of the product around for them to run out and purchase it right now. On the other hand, you’ve got to make sure that you’ve got enough of the product to drive down the price point enough to make good margins while keeping the competition away from your efforts. A chain of supply will help you get products to retailers in a timely fashion, yet still keep scarcity alive because limited shipments exist to stores. That’s why people will line up for days in advance to get certain products!

9. Go Viral
You don’t need to create viral marketing in order to go viral. The goal is to get customers demanding products from you. Using Facebook is one of the most commonly seen methods of a pull tactic today because it happens literally 2.7 billion times around the world. When someone likes a page or a product and this is shared with their friends, that’s a classic pull right there.

10. Do a Great Video
Video marketing engages both mechanisms. The video demonstrates a product to a consumer, creating a push. People will share the video and it becomes a pull. You can include it with a blog post for even more of a pull. That makes it one of the most effective strategies of all.