Using Push and Pull Marketing Strategies for Your Websites

Let’s take a look at some push and pull marketing strategies you can use to effectively promote your website or business. They are categorized according to their method (push/pull), although some of them may fall into both strategy types.

Here are six common pull marketing strategies you can use:

1. Syndicate Your Content/Skills. Guest blogging allows more people to read your content and know your brand. You can also contact email list owners and offer to have an article of yours sent through their list for a fee. If you’re a designer, offer to create designs for prominent websites for free and make sure your designer credit link is left on the site for exposure. Create and share your content through social media channels.

2. Develop Relationships with the Media. Journalists will often quote experts they are familiar with because of convenience and trust. The same goes for bloggers. Networking with the media and getting to know them well can allow you to obtain a lot of credibility, especially when you are cited in major publications/websites that are trusted by the audiences you want to target.

3. Create a Blog and Write Relevant Articles. In this scenario, a blog’s purpose is to produce educational content to teach users and fulfill their info needs. Create dozens of resource pages and make sure they rank well on search engines. You want to dominate a niche, demonstrate your knowledge and use content to support your service, ad or affiliate-based monetization strategy.

4. Interview Thought Leaders and Niche Experts. Leverage the brand power of other individuals and use them to build your own reputation. Interviews with notable personalities attract attention to your website and may send you targeted visitors as well, should the personality choose to mention your site.

5. Volunteer your Expertise. Pick an online community (e.g. networking site/forum) that is most relevant to your website. Volunteer your time in helping other individuals in it. If the community is large enough, word of mouth by the members can easily send you potential customers or readers.

6. Create an Online Community. The authenticity of other user opinions is something that is difficult to replicate by your business. By creating an online forum that is attached to your website, you allow other users to be more deeply immersed in the conversation that is going on about your site, product or brand. This grows initial interest into eventual loyalty.

And here are four push strategies you can use:

1. Paid Advertising. There are many types of paid advertising methods available and their goal is largely the same: to obtain traffic that will hopefully convert into customers or leads (RSS subscribers for blogs). Paid advertising is especially useful for sales pages, which may not fit well in pull marketing channels like social media.

2. Incentive-Based Promotions. Offer an incentive for users to promote your websites. This can be a public affiliate program which gives users a commission for every referred sale. Because of its overt commercial overtones, many audiences may see this as interruptive marketing instead of real word of mouth.

3. Create and Maintain an Email List. You should always aim to build an email list for both potential buyers and existing customers. This allows you to push advertisements away from normal communication channels and is a very cost-effective way to generate sales.

Educational email newsletters can be considered a pull marketing strategy because they will often draw in new prospects through word of mouth.

4. Joint Venture with other Businesses/Bloggers. This is a variation of paid advertising. Offer to pay partners a referral fee if they refer prospects to your website. Non-profit communities or online associations are a good place to set up referral networks. Bloggers are also possible JV partners to consider.

Both push and pull marketing strategies work well to achieve specific goals. Integrating both strategies in a long term marketing plan is an effective way to promote any business or website.