Understanding Push and Pull in Network Marketing

Imagine walking through a farmer’s market.

One vendor has a megaphone, announcing their products and free samples loudly to all the attendees. They shout out their specials to try to bring people over to their space.

The vendor at another stall is quiet, but a steady stream of people are drawn to its aroma of freshly baked bread and rolls and stunning display.

These are examples of the two types of marketing you can do: push marketing and pull marketing.

Let’s talk about what push and pull marketing are, then see if you can tell which vendor is which by the end.

What Is Push Marketing?

Push marketing is when you try to push your business out in front of your potential customers.

It’s proactive, deliberate, and aggressive.

Push marketing is most effective in generating sales and momentum in the short term.

It can be a great strategy during some specific times:

• When you launch your business
• If you have a new product
• To expand to a new niche
• During sales
• To generate brand recognition

Push marketing is effective, but it isn’t always sustainable.

What Is Pull Marketing?

Instead of taking your products to your customers, pull marketing does the opposite.

In pull marketing, you are pulling your customers into you.

Pull marketing is a more subtle art than push marketing.

Another name for it is influence marketing, a tier above MLM attraction marketing.

In pull marketing, you naturally accrue an audience.

You’re playing the long game with pull marketing.

You should focus on pull marketing when you are trying to accomplish any of these:

• Build brand loyalty
• Establish yourself as an expert in a specific niche
• Engage with customers before they even know they want anything from you
• Organically grow traffic
• Turn customers into return customers

Both forms of marketing have their place, but customers are often fans of finding brands organically instead of having them shoved in their faces.

Examples of Push and Pull Marketing

Examples of push marketing would be:

• Paid advertising
• Email marketing
• Social media ads

When you are paying for your advertisement to be a banner across someone’s page, you’re pushing your business in front of the customer.

If you have a marketing campaign, you are pushing your business into the customer’s email account.

When you run social media ads, you are pushing your content to be displayed in your client demographic’s feeds.

Alternatively, examples of pull marketing would be:

• Search engine optimization (SEO)
• Content creation
• Social media presence

SEO is when you build up your site to encourage search engines to rank you higher.

When was the last time you looked at Google’s page two?

Hardly ever, right?

Same with all your customers.

When you work on search engine optimization, you do a lot of behind-the-scenes work to tell Google that you deserve to be on its first page of results.

If you feed the algorithms what they want, you will get the results you want.

A lot of SEO is creating content to establish yourself as an authority and expert on a topic.

When search engines can tell that you have a lot of content about a certain topic, they will reward you with higher search rankings.

There are a lot of SEO strategies out there, but the best ones don’t cut corners.

Your social media presence is another key to the long-term goals you will set. When you create your account, you probably won’t go viral overnight. Instead, you want to consistently post and engage to build a foundation.

That way, when a potential customer comes along, they will have plenty of posts and content to look through.

As you pick up accounts engaging with yours, their friends will see, which is a win for you.

People trust brands their friends trust.

Pushing and Pulling in All Directions

So, at the farmer’s market, can you tell which was which?

The megaphone-wielding vendor was using push marketing.

The baker was using pull marketing.

The concepts of pushing and pulling might seem overwhelming. You might feel pushed and pulled in many directions to implement different strategies for your business.

Before you take any drastic steps, take a breath.

Think of your current long-term and short-term goals:

• What do you want to accomplish this month?
• Where do you want your business to go in the next five years?

The beauty of push and pull marketing is that they work together well.

Always work on your long-term goals, supplementing that consistency with work toward your short-term goals. Make a strategy that will help you reach those goals.

This is more than just attraction marketing for MLMs–this is influence marketing for when you’re ready to amplify your results. You’ll be pulling in customers before you know it.