Push vs Pull Marketing
Push marketing is all about paid ads. It’s all about paying for the privilege to put your message in front of somebody else’s audience. Think Facebook ads or Google ads or the Google display network or any other kind of paid advertising where you have to pay for that privilege to put your message in front of somebody else’s audience.
Pull marketing, on the other hand, is all about giving value. It’s all about organic reach and putting out value to achieve that reach. It’s not about paying somebody for your exposure, it’s about earning that exposure through the value that you give and you can do this by creating content like blog content, video content, even social media content, and using that content to gain organic reach.
The nature of push marketing is all about interrupting people, their feed, search, and their daily lives to put your message in front of them when they haven’t asked for that whereas pull marketing and content marketing is all about going out there and helping the audience with a type of problem that they have. One very good piece of content marketing can bring in thousands of visitors per month and that can go on for months on end or even years on end. Just invest in a single piece of content and that can bring in leads year after year. I highly recommend getting into content marketing if you haven’t already.
Another reason that you will like about the content marketing approach is the profile that it helps you raise. It does raise your expert profile and your authority in the marketplace because you’re helping people with their problems. They’re coming to you as a source to overcome their challenges and once you’ve helped them with just one problem they’re going to remember that and it’s going to elevate your image in their mind as an expert and an authority in the marketplace so that’s another added advantage of creating content. if you get content marketing right or if you take the time to develop your skills, it can act as a tool for you to bring in leads years after you’ve taken the time to invest in a single piece of content.
Let’s jump into the marketing tips that you can use to build your brand and start pulling your clients and your leads in.
Define Your Niche
This is the single biggest mistake that I see businesses in general make. They don’t take the time to specify the niche that they want to serve. I’ll give you a little hint here, small business is not a niche. Nobody identifies with small businesses. Personally, if I see something with a small business on it I do not give it the time of day because it’s not talking directly to me. Only when you specify a niche can you be specific with your messaging and the content that you put out there to help them with a very specific problem. Take the time to think about what service you want to offer to a particular niche.
Know Your Audience
This is all about the person within the niche that you’re trying to reach. Who is that person? What’s their life like? What kind of job do they have? What kind of challenges do they have during the day? What kind of challenges are you trying to help them with? Once they overcome that challenge, where is it that they’re going to? What is their objective and goals? This is about understanding the person within that niche that you’re trying to reach. Once you understand all of that then it becomes a lot easier to start creating content to help that person.
Select Your Content-Type
This is all about knowing yourself, knowing your skill sets, knowing what you’re passionate about, and giving it a try. You might feel that video is not for you, you just can’t get in front of the camera or you might feel that you just do not have those creative writing skills but you need to select an avenue for your content creation and decide which avenue that you’re going to go with and commit to that. Go all-in on it and you just push through the pain barrier of believing that you’re terrible at it and give yourself some kind of challenge may be a 30-day challenge to create content and you will get better.
Do Your Keyword Research
Once you understand that audience and you understand the challenge that they have then you can get an idea for what types of queries they are typing into Google or YouTube. When you understand those queries and you’re able to open the world of keyword research and identify the keywords that they’re using in those search terms, it opens up another world in terms of all of the content that you can create. But it is important to remember here that the shorter tail the keyword as in the shorter the number of words in the search term that you’re trying to rank for the more difficult it is to rank. If you have a niche that you’re targeting and you know the challenges that specific business has, it becomes a lot easier to rank for more specific keywords than it is for broader keywords that many industries are probably trying to rank for. It’s important to do your keyword research here but it’s also very important to have that niche and to understand the person that you’re trying to reach.
Generate Content Ideas
The keyword research that you do will give you a very good idea of the content that you should be creating but one of the first places that you should start is by identifying all of the challenges that your audience has. What questions would they have if they have the opportunity to speak to an expert? That can be the basis for your initial content. You can get 30 questions or more that your audience might ask about your specific industry and what you are trying to help them with or even other topics that they might have and around what they do or what they’re trying to do. If you know those challenges and you start to jot down the individual questions they might ask that can act as the basis for your initial content.
Get Creating
Starting any new habit is hard and especially if you’re not good at it then chances are when you start creating content for the first time you’re not going to be good at it even if you’re writing articles or doing videos it doesn’t matter. You are not going to be great at it, you are going to be trying out new things and you are going to be finding your feet for the first while. If you think about how many gym memberships out there bought and paid for by people with great intentions that don’t follow through, it illustrates the point that starting a new habit is hard but the key here is in the process is you need to jot down the individual tasks that you need to go through to create a single piece of content and once you have those process down, every time you tick one of those boxes it’s like a mini accomplishment. It’s easier on the mind when you have a set of key tasks that you need to accomplish to create a piece of content then it’s less of a burden on the mind. Take the time to map out those individual tasks that you need to do. Make sure you have your processes down packed and then stick with it. Commit to a 30-day challenge or a 90-day challenge and I guarantee you that your 30th or your 90th piece of content will be way better than your first.
Be Consistent
This is where 90% of content creators fail because over time it is more and more difficult to keep that consistency. This is where the 30 days and the 90-day challenge come in because it forces you to be consistent and prove to yourself that you can do it so you can keep that momentum going and that momentum is the key. If you’re going to write three articles per week make sure you write three articles per week, if you are going to do one video per week make sure you do that as well and once you set that momentum in place keep that momentum going and that is key if you are going to go from a bad content creator to a good content creator then it’s all about that consistency. Once you become good then you know the content creation process becomes a lot easier. I can’t stress this enough to be consistent.
Of course, this article is all about content marketing and it’s not to say that push marketing and paid marketing have no place. A solid marketing strategy will include both push and pull marketing. But if you want to build a modern brand today you need to be investing in content. If you invest in the content long term the content that you create today could be paying dividends in months or years to come.
Beautiful