The Relationship Between the Push & Pull of Traffic in Inbound Marketing

There is a unique relationship between the inbound marketing efforts that we undertake when it comes to on-site marketing and off-site marketing. In a way, this relationship could be described as a push and pull of traffic to a website.

We were sitting in a company meeting one day trying to figure out how to classify the difference between our Search Marketing and Inbound Marketing departments. We have even been viewing these incongruently within the walls of AdVision over the last year and it felt like we had an identity issue. Internally we had divided our departments into Inbound and Search, but this syntax wasn’t right. Inbound marketing is about crafting an overall strategy to get found by your prospects and customers online, while also utilizing many of the search marketing functionalities, so it didn’t quite fit.

Then it hit us in a stroke of brilliance. It’s more about the marketer’s ability to “push” and “pull” online traffic, leads and revenue to a website. Once we figured that out, it all made sense. It was a lot easier to ascertain what activities push traffic to the site, and how to optimize the website in order to pull this traffic in and compel its visitors to convert.

Push Marketing can be described as activities that fall under the umbrella of search marketing, including any efforts to bring traffic to the website from an outside referral source. These can range from anything including pay-per-click advertising or media buying and banner ads through Google, Bing or any other specialty syndicators. It also includes SEO related activities to improve organic web traffic 

Once a Search Marketer has facilitated an interested party's click through to a providing party’s website, their job is essentially complete. There are no optimizations or levers a search marketer can pull in order to increase conversion rate once the qualified traffic has been brought to the website. 

Open up any AdWords account and you can instantly see a snapshot of performance. We gauge our ads relevance by click-through-rate, the number of times an ad is seen versus the number of times it is clicked. Is it above 5%? Awesome, industry standard is between 1%-2%! It’s apparent that we are engaging searchers with our ads and we are bringing qualified traffic to the site.

Now look at the conversion rate, the number of people who convert compared to total number of visitors.  In the same account, it’s only 0.9%. What’s the deal?

This is where pull diagnostics come into play. Look at the page the destination URL is pointing to. Is it a truly optimized landing page for conversion? If there are no direct conversion elements such as forms, is there a clear call-to-action or a phone number above the fold? Does the hero image engage? Have you provided enough information on the website for that person to feel educated enough to convert? Often times the answer here is that the on-site experience is not sufficient.

Pull Marketing denotes activities we undertake on-site in order to better attract, engage, and convert online leads or sales. Pull marketing is much more about appealing to your buyer personas, conversion rate optimization, and an overall website strategy working seamlessly together.

Where we see the highest success rates is by crafting a plan around our client’s buyer personas. We customize the web experience for our most qualified visitors, provide more engaging and educational content, and utilize opportunities on-site to bring that traffic down the sales funnel to convert.

Imagine one of your most recent online searches – you have just clicked through from a Google search and are investigating a website. Not sure you are really ready to get a quote for our services? Take a look at any of our service pages to learn more about our various service offerings. Oh, and while you are there, let me offer you a free eBook that will provide you exactly the right information you need to understand if the services we provide cater directly to the problems you were experiencing in the first place. Just fill out this easy 4-field form so I can collect your contact information, send you the eBook via email, and follow up with you to ask if you have any further questions and ultimately schedule that consultation. Let me then use this contact information to notify you of our future promotions and keep you as a lifetime customer. These are all hypotheticals of course, and each of our client’s strategies is crafted specifically to their needs, but you can get the picture.

Once the Pull Marketing strategy has been tested and proven, and we have raised site-wide conversion rates from 0.5% to 5%, then how do we pour more gas on the fire and get more traffic to the site? We have this well-oiled machine of a website - it’s time to push again.

In our opinion, the ‘nirvana’ state of digital marketing ROI utilizes push and pull in tandem. We often get inquiries from potential clients who say, “we just want PPC”, “I really want to work on my SEO”, or “I only want email nurture right now”. At AdVision Marketing, we understand their pain points, but what we truly understand is the return that a holistic digital strategy can provide.