How to Reach Your Customers 📤

Hey friends,

If you know your customers well, then you should be able to tell what stage of awareness they are at for your product or service.

But knowing is only half the battle. You still have to figure out how to get your message to them. This is where we're going to start talking about channels, specifically with regards to the Digital Marketing Framework.

1) Push Marketing

The first way was to “push” your ad in front of others. This is also often what people refer to as "advertising", since you are actively promoting what your product or service (most likely by paying for the privilege). This could be by buying a billboard ad, tv, or radio commercial, or by distributing a flyer. For Digital Marketing this takes the form of image or video ads online (Social Media ads, YouTube ads and other display ads that you see while browsing online).

2) Pull Marketing

The second way that you could market your business is to hope that people come to you (by convenience of your location, or a listing somewhere). This form of marketing is often called “pull” marketing, because you are pulling in people to your business, as opposed to pushing your ad out to them. For example, you could list your business in a directory (like the yellow pages, or through local business listings), and wait for people to contact you. The main way this is done in Digital Marketing is through Google Search Ads and Google Shopping ads.

3) Long-Term Marketing

The third type of marketing relates to building consistent growth over time. This includes building your brand to an extent that people know about you (also known as branding), and growing through sustainable long-term efforts, like building trust, word of mouth, attending trade shows, community events etc. In digital marketing, this is mainly SEO (Search Engine Optimization, getting your site to rank organically on search engines) and content inbound marketing (generating content on social media, blogs, YouTube etc.)

4) Retention & Loyalty

The fourth and final main way to market to people is not really to market to anyone new at all, but just to keep serving people that already know about you. This is often a good strategy because it is far less expensive to keep a current customer than to get a new customer. In the digital world, this would be through email marketing, drip campaigns (automated emails), messenger broadcasts (WhatsApp) and remarketing ads.

💵 Money versus time ⏳

When thinking about these 4 channel categories, it's important to keep in mind that the first two (Push and Pull marketing) are ones that bring you traffic immediately, but make you pay, while the second two (long term and retention) are ones that are free but take longer to yield results. Therefore, you need to balance between how quick you want to see results versus how much you want to pay. For example, if I want customers now I would focus on push and pull marketing, while if I want to lower my marketing costs (and don't care as much about immediate results), I would focus on long term or retention tactics.

Your Next Steps

Explore each of these channels and think about how they can relate to your business, depending on what your business goals are.

Next Up

Stay tuned for the next edition in which we’ll go over some marketing strategies to use for these channels, related to what stage your potential customers are at.