Increasing Brand Awareness With Pull Marketing

The very first post that I wrote for MarketMe was Pull Your Customers With Your Online Marketing.  In it I talked about how many of the online marketing strategies, namely social media, in use today are pull marketing strategies.  This means that you are putting yourself, your message, your business out there on the net and your potential customers are able to pull information about you.  Recently UKSmallBusiness left a comment on that post and something that stood out to me was that he referred to branding as push marketing.

My first instinct was, “Yes branding is push marketing.”  But, then as I thought about it I realized that is not entirely true.  When most of us think of ‘branding’ we may think of direct mail, television commercials, or billboard type advertising with a large and in your face branding approach.  However, branding also exists in online pull marketing, it just may not seem as obvious.

As Darren Rowse over at ProBlogger states,

Every online interaction you have, every social networking or bookmarking site that you participate in, every comment that you leave on other blogs, every interview that you do, every decision you make about your own blog, every comment that you leave on a forum, every guest post that you write on another blog - all of these things (and more) add to your own personal brand.

If you are actively participating in social media, you are increasing your brand awareness.  In fact some would say that Social Media Marketing Is Branding.  Historically, increasing brand awareness has probably been one of the hardest things to do for a small business.  Companies like Nike, Coca Cola, and McDonald’s have spent gazillions of dollars to increase their brand awareness to the point where they are recognized all over the world.  This is not a luxury that we as small businesses have.  However, by using social media we can increase our brand awareness to the point that we may be recognized in a smaller, yet more specific, group of people - mainly our target audience within our social networking groups.

So next time you Tweet, comment, post a blog or StumbleUpon someone else’s, remember that you aren’t just contributing to your online community, you are contributing to the image of your brand.

Reader Comments

Sahil Parikh says...May 1st, 2008

Completely agree with you there. I also thing that small businesses, when branding themselves NEED to have a systemized marketing plan. To do so, they need to systemize their marketing processes so as to manage their outreach across social media.

I’m the founder of Deskaway , a project collaboration and Saas tool for small businesses. (we have a free version by the way and the enterprise version isn’t too expensive) - when branding your company online, if it’s being done individually, you need to define your tasks. If you are working as a group, you need to ensure that your internet branding is synergistic. I think Deskaway probably helps fulfill all those needs.

Social Media Branding that you spoke of happens across Web 2.0. Here is something that might help when marketing across web 2.0 - “This ‘new’ Internet is more about concept than definition. It is about freedom of expression, it is about horizontal innovation, it is about openness and it is about exchange of information, and more than anything else it is about the respect of individuals who are also contributors.” (this should help people market effectively across web 2.0 - Brandi hinted at this as well)

PS
Deskaway is a small part of Web 2.0 as well - it forms a segment called Saas. If any of you happen to go to Deskaway and like please feel free to review it!

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