Push/Pull Marketing Drives Engagement with Target Audiences

Prepared by Brunner, Silver Sponsor at HIRI's 2024 Home Improvement Insights Summit. Join us this September 18 and 19, 2024 in Chicago! Learn more and register to attend here.

Home improvement brands like yours know the struggle of reaching and engaging three target audiences ' homeowners, contractors, and dealers. Each is essential to driving your sales numbers. 

In a highly competitive industry, connecting with these groups takes marketing that goes beyond the usual B2B and B2C campaigns.

Instead, home improvement brands need an integrated, B2B2C push/pull marketing strategy that combines your channel campaigns with ongoing demand generation, up and down the distribution chain.

At Brunner, we use push/pull marketing to drive results for home improvement brands, including YellaWood brand pressure treated pine and Owens Corning roofing products and roofing systems.

Here's how it works.

Understanding Key Audiences for Home Improvement Brands

The three key audiences for home improvement brands play different but interrelated roles in driving sales.

• Homeowners. As end users, they buy your products for DIY projects or hire a contractor to handle their job. You want them to buy your products or request them by name.
• Contractors. As direct customers, they purchase your materials for homeowner projects. You want them to recommend your products to their customers.
• Dealers. As distributors, they sell your product to DIYers and contractors. You want them to carry your brand and recommend it to customers.

What is Push/Pull Marketing and Why Is It a Fit for Home Improvement Brands?

Push/pull marketing merges B2B and B2C to drive demand through unified brand messaging that reaches multiple audiences. 

• Push marketing (B2B) pushes your products in-market in ways that create visibility with contractors and dealers, who can bring your product to the end user.
• Pull marketing (B2C) creates demand for your products from contractors and homeowners by building brand awareness and heightening brand value, so your product is the one they request.

By blending these approaches, your brand can reach multiple audiences across your product's distribution chain and control your brand message at every point in the sales journey. 

That reach is especially important as the U.S. home improvement market rebounds from a post-pandemic decline. HIRI's June 2024 home improvement products forecast calls for a slight increase in 2024, then an average of 3.5% growth from 2025-2028, up to $642.3 billion during that timeframe.

Push/Pull Marketing Drives Results for YellaWood

YellaWood's approach to push/pull marketing emphasizes three key areas:

1. Consistent brand messaging across push and pull tactics
2. A media campaign that overlaps dealers, contractors, and homeowners_
3. A long-term commitment to brand building and influencing purchase behavior

The brand's campaign features a charming, ragtag team of animated beavers (nature's master builders), who'll stop at nothing to get their paws on the best materials for their building projects. 

• Push tactics to engage dealers (new and existing relationships): Point-of-sale retail signage, email campaigns, sales enablement content, trade advertising, and dealer promotions
• Pull tactics to build brand affinity and product demand with homeowners and contractors: TV, audio, social media, the brand website, DIY project content, and OOH advertising

While YellaWood works directly with dealers, loyal contractors play a key role in driving demand with dealers. Those contractors, in turn, offer YellaWood products to homeowners who are already familiar with the brand and may request it by name. 

The push/pull campaign has been 'extremely effective' for YellaWood, says Rob Pongonis, CMO of Great Southern Wood Preserving. YellaWood results include: 

• 27% increase in homeowner unaided awareness over their closest competitor
• 30% increase in pro contractor unaided awareness
• 19% increase in pro contractor purchase intent

Focus on Roof Color Connects Homeowners, Contractors with Owens Corning

For Owens Corning, push/pull marketing focuses on shingle color, from Aged Copper to Williamsburg Gray, as a key aspect of their brand and an essential topic that contractors and homeowners discuss.

At kitchen table conversations about roofing projects, Owens Corning wants homeowners to know about ' and request ' its products, and in-network contractors to recommend those products.

To influence those discussions, Owens Corning and its partners, including Brunner, run campaigns on multiple channels. 

Brunner handles pull marketing campaigns on a number of channels. Our work includes:

1. Creating audience messaging maps that position Owens Corning products and color options as the solution. 
2. Layering the messages via a communications framework across key channels to reach homeowners where they are active.
3. Sharing tools and resources on channels contractors will see because we know they look to manufacturers for information and resources they can share. 

By reaching homeowners directly, Brunner's campaigns make it easier for contractors to win the job because the homeowner is already aware and impressed.

Interested In Learning More About Push/Pull Marketing?

Done well, push/pull marketing can influence purchase decisions made at the kitchen table, when a homeowner asks a contractor for your products by name, or in a dealer's home improvement aisles, where a contractor looks for your materials.

If you're ready to learn more about push/pull marketing, look for us at the HIRI Summit, happening September 18-19, 2024 in Chicago. We'd love to chat!

About Brunner

Brun­ner, a 2024 strate­gic part­ner of HIRI and a spon­sor of the HIRI Sum­mit, is a lead­ing inde­pen­dent inte­grat­ed mar­ket­ing agency that’s proud to have Good Peo­ple, Cre­at­ing Great Work for Our Clients. Brun­ner sim­pli­fies the com­plex­i­ties of mar­ket­ing by lever­ag­ing data insights to devel­op cre­ative solu­tions for clients’ mar­ket­ing chal­lenges. Brunner’s client port­fo­lio includes notable nation­al brands like The Home Depot Rental, Great South­ern Wood Pre­serv­ing, Mit­subishi North Amer­i­ca, Owens Corn­ing, and Rin­nai, among oth­ers. Brun­ner is head­quar­tered in Pitts­burgh, PA, with addi­tion­al offices in Atlanta, GA.