A comment from Paul D about push marketing:
“Thank you so much for taking the time to reply. I LOVE that distinction between push vs pull.
You are so right..with the VSL we are pushing them..selling them HARD on booking the call…in my gut I would much rather pull them into it.
That push doesn’t deliver much value.
I mean, that’s how I want to be treated…value…pull…attract…respect.
I’ve never seen it that way before…so thank you for tuning my perspective.
I also expect that using this approach would most likely fix, once and for all, most no-show issues.”
We’ve all experienced push marketing. It’s objection-crushing, persuasive sales minded marketing with the added high-octane racing fuel of urgency…
Does it work?
Absolutely.
Because it taps into the emotions of fear and insecurity. And as we’ve seen in countless movies and tv shows, fear is a powerful persuader of action.
Discounts and deadlines are all based on a fear of losing value if you don’t act right now.
“You only have a limited time before we offer less value to you, so buy now!“
This type of marketing pushes people into doing something that they wouldn’t have chosen by themselves already.
So you get all kinds of people as customers – because it was designed that way.
You may get good customers that like what you do, and you may get headache customers that make you let out a sigh of regret every time you hear from them.
This pushing method causes a ripple effect in your business too.
You will continually get more and more unsatisfied customers, leading to less people wanting to listen to your promotions, less people wanting to sign up to your emails, less people wanting to leave you reviews, and the few reviews you get are lukewarm at best.
The only value you are providing is behind a paywall. No help at all until money changes hands…
To top it all off, people are getting increasingly smarter about marketing. They’ve been burned too many times by shady businesses, over-hyped launched, and underwhelming products.
It’s getting harder and harder to push people into doing something they don’t want to do.
Pull Marketing
The alternative is pulling people in.
Try to think about your every day life. What draws you in to listen to other people? Even people you’ve never heard of before.
Whether you’re aware of it or not, all reasons you may come up with boil down to one thing and one thing only – stories.
Stories are the natural ways for humans to communicate and deliver ideas and information in a way that is interesting and worth listening to.
Whether it’s a coworker telling you what happened on their way to work, or whether it’s a book telling you what happens to the hero, or a movie about how the main character is actually going to get the girl in the end.
Everything revolves around telling stories. When your favourite character dies in your favourite TV show, it hurts right? It makes you feel something, and that feeling stays with you after the episode is over.
I was talking to my wife the other day about this movie I wanted to watch, she happened to have watched it a long time ago and told me it was a good one.
“Yeah? Why is that?” I asked out of curiosity, and she responded “I’m not sure. I can’t remember how it went, but I remember liking it a lot.”
When you choose to pull people into your business, we’re looking at our marketing from the perspective of our future customers.
We get the chance to deliver a lot of value before they even buy anything, because we’ve spent the time to think (and care) deeply about what we can do for them.
This extra value makes people care, it makes them remember you and willing to pay attention to you.
Pull marketing is based around three things: being memorable, relatable, and emotional.