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5 tips for balancing ‘push’ and ‘pull’ in content marketing

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5 tips for balancing 'push' and 'pull' in content marketing

The health of your business is highly dependent on your marketing strategy. In turn, your marketing strategy’s success depends on your content’s quality and substance.

Customers overwhelmingly rely on a company’s content for purchasing decisions. One survey found that most people prefer content over social media, reviews or contact with a sales rep.

So, how can you ensure your content marketing makes the right impact? 

Dig into the following information to discover the benefit of promoting engagement over pushing sales in your written content. Plus, learn how to combine the two strategies successfully.

Key takeaways:

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  • Promoting customer engagement is a better long-term content marketing strategy but requires patience and consistency.
  • Pushing sales can be good for quick wins but has a lower return on investment.
  • Companies often need good data and an outside perspective to create content marketing strategies that strike the right balance of encouraging engagement and asking directly for sales.

1. Realize that good content marketing is like diet and exercising

Staying healthy as a business is similar to taking care of physical health. Most of us recognize that getting healthy (whether losing weight, gaining muscle or something else) requires patience and long-term commitment for lasting success.

Your content marketing is similar. Pushing sales is good for short wins that are rarely sustainable on their own (like a crash diet).

Pushing can be effective when you need a rapid boost or want quick data. However, engagement through “pull marketing” is the way to go if you want enduring success.

You must provide consistent long-form content that educates, informs and entertains your target audience to draw them in and convert them to loyal followers. At the same time, you need intelligent SEO strategies that keep you visible on search engines.

In other words, good content marketing that promotes engagement is a “healthy lifestyle” for your business. Your business needs a steady program of valuable content to attract high-value customers that engage with your brand.

Dig deeper: The art of natural funneling: How to lead your readers without forced CTAs

2. Understand what consumer engagement looks like

Customers have more influence in the modern market. As a result, you have to establish a mutually beneficial relationship with inbound marketing. 

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Compelling content that provides real value through actionable information builds trust and loyalty. Real engagement is more than a vote with a customer’s dollars. A client becomes a champion of your brand and increases their customer lifetime value.

Boosting engagement is more valuable than simply getting a brief uptick in sales. When your company receives a notable sales spike, don’t just congratulate yourself for a job well done.

Take time to figure out what worked, why and how to maintain that response with continuous content highlighting your brand’s value to your audience. Determine engagement by tracking how your audience interacts with you through comments, likes, clicks and subscriptions.

Discover how to match your brand strategy with your customer goals. Use content marketing and SEO practices to position yourself as an expert and thought leader that helps clients succeed. 

3. Recognize when you’re pushing sales too much

As a marketing professional, it’s surprising how often experienced business people think they’re providing value in content when they’re really still pushing sales. Anyone can get so deep in the weeds of their own industry that they lose sight of building customer relationships. 

Avoid having “sales breath” in your content by only promoting products. Desperation and self-interest push good leads away. Instead, sincerely look to help people, whether they use your service or not.

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Creating the right blend of engagement and pushing sales is difficult and often requires an outside perspective to see where you’re missing the boat. You can do this through surveys or with the help of an experienced consultant or agency.

4. Discover how to push sales correctly

The need to push sales at the right time will never die. Your business requires methods to reach customers who know they need your solution and are ready to buy.

The trick to not wasting your advertising budget on low-return campaigns is constant measurement and good tactics, just like with your engagement strategy. Monitor and figure out who comes in your door (physically or virtually) in response to those campaigns. 

Now, study your ideal customers to find out what they like. Then provide excellent written content that they can respond to and keeps them coming back for more.

5. Use proven strategies for building engagement

Time-tested content marketing strategies continue to get results. Your biggest needs are quality and consistency. What makes that difficult is staying in tune with what your audience wants.

As you create content, ask yourself and your team:

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  • Do these pieces have an honest and relevant tone?
  • Does the subject matter to our intended readers?
  • Are we bringing a unique perspective?
  • Are we supporting our information with good data?
  • Are we giving readers something specific they can use?

To get engagement, always wrap up your content with a clear call to action that tells your readers how to apply what they’ve learned or maximize results with your help. As you build credibility and provide value, clients will take you up on that offer more and more.

Keep working on your content marketing

Devising the right blend of engagement and pushing sales takes time and smart strategizing, just like improving your physical health. 

Create a solid marketing plan that addresses customer concerns and continually refine your methods to create written content that leads to loyal customers.


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Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily MarTech. Staff authors are listed here.

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MARKETING

Trends in Content Localization – Moz

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Trends in Content Localization - Moz

Multinational fast food chains are one of the best-known examples of recognizing that product menus may sometimes have to change significantly to serve distinct audiences. The above video is just a short run-through of the same business selling smokehouse burgers, kofta, paneer, and rice bowls in an effort to appeal to people in a variety of places. I can’t personally judge the validity of these representations, but what I can see is that, in such cases, you don’t merely localize your content but the products on which your content is founded.

Sometimes, even the branding of businesses is different around the world; what we call Burger King in America is Hungry Jack’s in Australia, Lays potato chips here are Sabritas in Mexico, and DiGiorno frozen pizza is familiar in the US, but Canada knows it as Delissio.

Tales of product tailoring failures often become famous, likely because some of them may seem humorous from a distance, but cultural sensitivity should always be taken seriously. If a brand you are marketing is on its way to becoming a large global seller, the best insurance against reputation damage and revenue loss as a result of cultural insensitivity is to employ regional and cultural experts whose first-hand and lived experiences can steward the organization in acting with awareness and respect.

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How AI Is Redefining Startup GTM Strategy

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How AI Is Redefining Startup GTM Strategy

AI and startups? It just makes sense.

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MARKETING

More promotions and more layoffs

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More promotions and more layoffs

For martech professionals salaries are good and promotions are coming faster, unfortunately, layoffs are coming faster, too. That’s according to the just-released 2024 Martech Salary and Career Survey. Another very unfortunate finding: The median salary of women below the C-suite level is 35% less than what men earn.

The last year saw many different economic trends, some at odds with each other. Although unemployment remained very low overall and the economy grew, some businesses — especially those in technology and media — cut both jobs and spending. Reasons cited for the cuts include during the early years of the pandemic, higher interest rates and corporate greed.

Dig deeper: How to overcome marketing budget cuts and hiring freezes

Be that as it may, for the employed it remains a good time to be a martech professional. Salaries remain lucrative compared to many other professions, with an overall median salary of $128,643. 

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Here are the median salaries by role:

  • Senior management $199,653
  • Director $157,776
  • Manager $99,510
  • Staff $89,126

Senior managers make more than twice what staff make. Directors and up had a $163,395 median salary compared to manager/staff roles, where the median was $94,818.

One-third of those surveyed said they were promoted in the last 12 months, a finding that was nearly equal among director+ (32%) and managers and staff (30%). 

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Extend the time frame to two years, and nearly three-quarters of director+ respondents say they received a promotion, while the same can be said for two-thirds of manager and staff respondents.

Dig deeper: Skills-based hiring for modern marketing teams

Employee turnover 

In 2023, we asked survey respondents if they noticed an increase in employee churn and whether they would classify that churn as a “moderate” or “significant” increase. For 2024, given the attention on cost reductions and layoffs, we asked if the churn they witnessed was “voluntary” (e.g., people leaving for another role) or “involuntary” (e.g., a layoff or dismissal). More than half of the marketing technology professionals said churn increased in the last year. Nearly one-third classified most of the churn as “involuntary.”

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Men and Women

Screenshot 2024 03 21 124540Screenshot 2024 03 21 124540

This year, instead of using average salary figures, we used the median figures to lessen the impact of outliers in the salary data. As a result, the gap between salaries for men and women is even more glaring than it was previously.

In last year’s report, men earned an average of 24% more than women. This year the median salary of men is 35% more than the median salary of women. That is until you get to the upper echelons. Women at director and up earned 5% more than men.

Methodology

The 2024 MarTech Salary and Career Survey is a joint project of MarTech.org and chiefmartec.com. We surveyed 305 marketers between December 2023 and February 2024; 297 of those provided salary information. Nearly 63% (191) of respondents live in North America; 16% (50) live in Western Europe. The conclusions in this report are limited to responses from those individuals only. Other regions were excluded due to the limited number of respondents. 

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Download your copy of the 2024 MarTech Salary and Career Survey here. No registration is required.

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