Acquiring new customers is the first thing that comes to mind to increase turnover but it is certainly not the easiest thing. You could invest a lot of time and money if you lack a clear and shared strategy.
First of all, it is the task of marketing to find customers and cultivate them while it is the task of the sales department to close a negotiation by transforming the prospect into a customer.
In general, we can say that there are two marketing strategies to find new customers: Push marketing and pull marketing.
Push Marketing (outbound marketing)
Push marketing consists of selecting a certain type of customer and sending direct communications.
In fact, push marketing is also known as direct response marketing or outbound marketing.
Generally, messages are sent by phone, e-mail, fax, ordinary mail or even by SMS or WhatsApp. Outbound marketing is based on techniques and processes aimed at finding more customers, even when they do not want to be found.
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Pull Marketing (inbound marketing)
Pull marketing, on the other hand, attracts potential customers to a website page or social channels and is also known as inbound marketing.
In the information age, the customer is able to find what he needs through search engines on his own.
They also use reviews and ask their network for advice to select a product or brand, so pull marketing seems to be the better solution of the two, but it is not obvious.
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Push marketing vs. pull marketing: A comparison of different strategies
Is it better to use a push marketing strategy or pull marketing?
In practice, is it better to communicate directly or attract potential customers with more refined and less invasive techniques?
Push marketing can also be defined as the More traditional marketing which uses more well-known messages and communication techniques such as: telemarketing, direct mail, billboards, TV and radio commercials, newspaper advertisements, ordinary mail and even procurers of new contacts to be transformed into customers.
Unlike pull marketing, it is a State-of-the-art marketing technology that uses online channels with communication tools that focus on valuable content (both posts and videos) and SEO techniques to be indexed in search engines and be found by customers.
With pull marketing, it is necessary to create a system capable of generating new customers through several phases: the acquisition of a contact, the cultivation of the relationship with free value propositions to generate trust and finally the profiling of potential customers in target for the conversion from prospect to customer.
Generally It is not possible to determine in advance which marketing strategy is best.
The choice depends on many factors: the type of company, the target audience, the sector in which it operates and also the budget available or the type of product or service sold.
If your company has a b2b model, and for example operates in ICT distribution by turning to stores that sell IT products such as computers, printers, tablets, etc.
In this case, it could be useful to have a complete database or a list of contacts to be transformed into potential customers through pull marketing techniques, communicating the commercial proposal by phone or email, for example.
On the other hand, if your company is aimed at private customers, pull marketing may be more effective, especially with the creation of valuable content such as articles, podcasts, ebooks or whitepapers capable of creating a relationship of trust to stimulate them to buy the product/service.
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System for generating customers
In both cases, it is necessary to have a structured system for acquiring new customers that involves identifying sources, assigning the contact to a person in your team in charge of following the qualification and conversion phases of the contact until it becomes a customer.
These rules must be clear and possibly written in a manual that regulates the procedures for engaging new customers.
Finding new clients is a time-consuming and effort-intensive task, and the only way to get results is to try to be as organized as possible.
Regardless of the marketing technique used, push marketing or pull marketing, you need to find a way to better manage your contact list and follow the qualification process.
The best way to manage the master data of potential customers is to use a CRM management software instead of relying on an Excel sheet that in a short time will become very confusing with so many filters and reminders to write down the most important information.
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CRM to manage contacts obtained from outbound marketing
In case you have decided to apply outbound marketing strategies, after extracting a list of contacts from the network or through a database of contacts of potential customers in line with your target, you will need to import this list of contacts into your CRM.
You can usually import the full list of different contacts into the CRM so that your team can profile them as you go.
Subsequently, for example, you can send an email to present your offer or start an initial telephone contact to make appointments and check interest.
In this way, you will be able to profile your contacts as you go along, to understand those who are qualified from those who are not.
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CRM to manage contacts generated by inbound marketing
If you use inbound marketing techniques to attract customers to a web page, then you will need to generate traffic to that page through valuable content or paid advertising.
In any case, thanks to the CRM You can automatically transfer the contact details of the user who filled out the form and showed interest in your valuable content to the prospects' database.
Below, through marketing automation techniques, you can send e-mails that are timed over time based on the prospect's triggers and behaviors.
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