VIDEO with transcript: What’s the difference between push and pull marketing

Hey everyone. Alex McCracken here again with Funeral Innovations. Hope you’re subscribing to our YouTube channel to get all the latest updates on the difference between traditional and digital marketing. Today we’re covering the difference between push and pull marketing as it regards to traditional and digital marketing.

Traditional marketing is your traditional push marketing. With traditional marketing, we have one message that we push out to our community. Think about a billboard. What is it? It’s one message: “Smith and Sons Funeral Home.” That’s one thing that you’re putting out on your billboard and hoping that you’re pushing a message out that sticks to people who might be driving or walking by.

It’s the same thing with the Yellow Pages. You’re putting a message out that says “this is one thing about us and we’re going to push it to everyone.” It’s the same with a flyer. A flyer or a church handout is one message that you’re pushing out to everybody. That’s really what push marketing is. You’re putting one message out there and trusting that a lot of people will pick up on it.

Digital marketing is where pull marketing comes into play. With digital marketing, we can put out a variety of different messages; what I would like to call “crumbs”. Put out little crumbs all over the internet with different messages pulling in different members of the community. So now we’re not just giving one message, we’re saying “hey we’ve got a ton of different things that our community might find valuable and we’re gonna put them out in different little areas to pull people in.”

The value is in catering to different segments of your community and attracting them to your message. Since you’re speaking more directly to them, you are going to get a lot more engagement. It also helps you see what people are interested in. If more people are being pulled to one message, you can take that message and expand it to little subsections of that message.

An example of this might be putting information out about cremation. If cremation is an area of information that your community is really engaging in, break the message up into little segments:

  • what is cremation?
  • what is the technical process of cremation?
  • what is permanent memorialization?
  • or what is the value of other services that are provided with a cremation?

There are multiple things within that one topic that we can pull people to.

So the difference between push and pull marketing as it relates to traditional and digital marketing is: Traditional is push: putting one message out there pushing it to everyone. Digital is pulling people in using a variety of messages.

I hope you found this interesting. Subscribe to our YouTube channel to learn about more topics like this in the coming weeks.