Pull, Don’t Push – Marketing Lessons from Poultry

Marketing has never been so easily accessible for small business owners. There are myriad ways to get your message out to customers, from Facebook and Twitter to blogging communities – with the tools at your disposal now, you can practically run your own PR campaign.

It is very tempting to get online and start blasting away promotions. However, if this is all you do, you’ll quickly get a reputation as a spammer – annoying your audience and getting ignored – or even worse, blocked.

Instead of PUSHING your message, why not formulate a strategy to PULL your audience in with interactive content?

Case Study:

Our website builder company, CityMax.com, was attending Canada’s largest blogging and social media conference – Northern Voice – and wanted to make splash. Sponsorship was briefly considered, then passed on for its ‘vanilla appeal’ and low ROI. How could we get the bloggers and Tweeters – some of the most influential in Canada – talking about us?

Sitting in a brainstorm session, I was inspired by a grocery store flyer advertising poultry: why not send a person in a massive chicken suit to the conference? The idea was to encourage attendees to take photos with the Chicken, and ‘tag’ themselves in our Facebook photo gallery for a chance to win an iPad. The tagging would then re-transmit on each Facebook user’s newsfeed to that person’s friends – a marketing chain with potentially huge rewards.

While intrigued, I did not think this stunt would be enough to make a serious impact on the actual conference – it would need something extra to reach its tipping point. Conference goers would need a reason to engage with our Chicken after the initial shock of seeing it walking around an event filled with corporate managers and business consultants. How would we ‘pull’ in our audience?

We decided that not only would the (branded) Chicken attend all conference sessions, but he would also communicate through Tweets and cardboard signs.

I brainstormed a series of hand-written questions for the Chicken to hold up during the panels, which resulted in a brief public dialogue with a city councilor regarding a timely issue – she good-naturedly responded, and the whole scene caused quite the stir.

While the Chicken was busy attending each session, I provided his voice – running commentary on Twitter (@OfficeChicken) about the conference and responses to the fan queries floating in the Twitterverse.

The result? Social media madness. Over 100 Tweets throughout the day were about @OfficeChicken, attracting countless retweets, mentions and photos from some of Vancouver’s most prolific bloggers – such as Miss 604.

People lined up to take snapshots with our feathered friend, building buzz to a point where even the conference organizers decided to capitalize on our momentum, offering a prize to the first person to “capture” the Chicken.

The end result? Chicken/CityMax-related tweets were sent out to an aggregate 50,000+ followers, and a large new base of CityMax followers was created.

The takeaways:

1) Pull content is built around your audience – not you.
We figured that most conference attendees would be like the animal mascot theme, if not be a bit confused – and being bloggers/Tweeters, they’d probably post questions or comments. They were also likely to be iPad fans and active on Facebook.

2) Create a strategy that includes a call to action.
What was the objective? To get tweets, photos, and Facebook tags of the people posing with the Office Chicken. If you don’t know what you are trying to achieve, how will you measure success?

3) Support your marketing plan with sustainability.
The entire chicken mascot initiative was supported by Tweets responding to the comments, exponentially building upon its momentum. By tagging photos of Northern Voice attendees on Facebook, their friends would be exposed to the Chicken and they were welcome to comment on the experience.

There’s nothing easy about making your marketing PULL instead of PUSH – but there’s a reason it pays off. When others are talking about you, rather than you selling yourself, the credibility of your business increases drastically. Hopefully you can incorporate some of these ideas into your business – what are your thoughts on the execution / strategy of our initiative?

Patrick Lok is Town Crier at CityMax.com, an easy website builder company that has helped 572,000+ small businesses owners grow online. Read more about Patrick here.

Matthew Toren

Matthew Toren is an Award Winning Author, Serial Entrepreneur, and Investor. He Co-Founded YoungEntrepreneur.com along with his brother Adam. Matthew is co-author of the newly released book:Small Business, Big Vision: “Lessons on How to Dominate Your Market from Self-Made Entrepreneurs Who Did it Right” and also co-author of Kidpreneurs.