In olden days (think 1994) marketing was 90% push marketing. We pushed messages in print, on broadcast, at trade shows, in directories, by direct mail, by any hunter-gatherer technique we could find.

We believed if we smiled louder than competing brands, more often, we would build awareness of our USP, and … our work was done.

That strategy is a dinosaur today, because it’s not how buyers buy. Your best prospects have bushels of information at hand, and can avoid (will avoid? must avoid?) your sales messages. Push gets more expensive year by year. So pull strategies are now useful and popular: getting more visible on search engine results, improving reputations on social media, etc. But 90% pull is as unwise as 90% push. There’s art and science to getting the balance optimized.

Don’t guess. Analyze. 2012 is the first year where more will be spent on pull than push. Where’s your budget going?