The Pitch: Give them what they want and they'll come back

By VICTORIA SCHMIDT*

A marketing campaign I ran for a small professional services provider resulted in 4000 website hits, 100 newsletter subscriptions and 12 appointments within a month.

The total cost of the campaign? $800. And that was simply the cost of the advice.

I used a strategy called pull marketing: the hottest technique since the worldwide web became a household term.

Its premise is that by giving prospective customers what they want and need - without expecting anything in return - the best kind of business (the most profitable business) will come roaring through the front door. And it works.

The traditional marketing industry is built upon a "push" model.

Marketers spend lots of time and money forming an ideal image of the company or product that they hope will resonate with prospective customers. This is called a brand.

Based on this brand, the marketing department spends more time and money pushing communications through every possible channel.

The result is usually mixed - some prospective customers "get it" but many others fail to make the connection between their specific needs and how the company is uniquely qualified to meet them.

The sales people are forced to make up the difference by learning about prospective customers' specific goals, then custom-crafting messages that position the company's offerings as ideal solutions.

While push marketing is successful for some companies (usually large-scale consumer products organisations), most find it ineffective and prohibitively expensive.

Any professional marketer can tell you what it feels like to suffer blown budgets, insufficient lead generation, and wasted sales efforts.

The marketing industry is ripe for innovation.

Pull marketing is driven not by a boardroom-conceived brand, but by a visceral understanding of what customers need combined with the guts to give it to them before they ask or pay for it.

Where did pull marketing come from? Like most innovations, it was born of necessity.

Consider the ubiquitous small business market in New Zealand. It's common knowledge that small businesses can't afford expensive marketing campaigns - hence the tendency of money-hungry marketing firms to look past the small-business market and focus on the larger chequebooks that lie yonder.

Similarly, sales departments within larger businesses lack the gargantuan budgets that are generously bestowed upon their siblings in marketing. So, both small businesses and sales teams have the very same objective: to win as much new business as possible for the least cost.

Pull marketing as a strategy arose to help such groups increase their sales volumes without incurring prohibitive marketing expenses.

And while it was originally conceived to meet the needs of those short of cash, consider this: if there was a viable new way to generate a substantial amount of business for very little money, wouldn't it be likely to catch on with every type of business? (Money-hungry marketing firms excepted, of course.)

Watch this space.

* Victoria Schmidt is an independent marketing strategist.

* The Pitch is a forum for those working in advertising, marketing, public relations and communications. We welcome lively and topical 500-word contributions.
Email Simon Hendery.

www.aspengroup.co.nz