SEA – Okon Schwarz – your advertising agency from Erfurt, Thuringia

Case Study: Digital Travel Magazine “Travel Together in the Weimarer Land”

DerSepp — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 17:24:40 +0000

Initial Situation

Weimarer Land Tourismus e. V. is responsible for destination marketing for one of the most culturally and scenically attractive regions in Thuringia — located in the city triangle between Erfurt, Weimar, and Jena.

The association’s goal is to position the Weimarer Land as a modern, sustainable, and high-quality holiday destination.

The challenge:

The traditional printed travel catalog was no longer up to date. Content becomes outdated quickly, production cycles are long, flexibility is limited — and today’s digital audience expects inspiration, interaction, and immediate booking options.

A new approach was needed.

Goal: A Digital Travel Magazine with Experiential Value

Instead of creating another static website, the objective was to develop a digital magazine that:

Tells stories instead of merely listing information
Evokes emotion and creates inspiration
Connects editorial content with concrete booking options
Can be flexibly maintained and further developed by the client
Is technically high-performing and fully mobile-optimized

In short: a complete digital travel experience in one place.

Our Role as the Agency

Prior to this project, we were already responsible for the technical maintenance of the association’s website and had jointly developed a “Digital Pool” — a structured collection of digital assets, forms, and content to streamline collaboration.

Building on this foundation, we were commissioned again — this time for:

Concept development of the digital magazine
UX and UI design
Technical implementation
Template development for editorial content
Performance marketing to promote the launch

Implementation: Dynamic Instead of Static

The key difference:

This was not intended to become an “online PDF,” but a dynamic, modular platform.

Our solutions:

1. Modular Template System
We developed flexible templates that enable the association’s team to independently publish reports, interviews, photo stories, and videos — without technical barriers.

2. Storytelling Structure
Instead of purely functional navigation, the magazine focuses on journalistic features, insider tips, and thematic travel narratives.

3. Responsive & Performance-Optimized
The magazine was fully responsive — optimized for desktop, tablet, and smartphone.

4. Conversion Integration
Editorial content was strategically linked to booking options. Inspiration and action are only a few clicks apart.

Collaboration

A key success factor was the continuous and structured exchange with the association’s representatives.

Feedback loops were efficiently integrated, revision requests implemented promptly, and design decisions aligned collaboratively. This resulted in an outcome that is convincing both strategically and visually.

Launch & Marketing

The digital travel magazine officially launched on August 15, 2025.

To support the market launch, we accompanied the project with:

Google Ads campaigns
Meta campaigns (Facebook & Instagram)
A social media giveaway to increase reach
Content partnerships

The goal was to generate awareness, build reach, and drive qualified traffic to the new magazine.

The Result

Today, “Travel Together in the Weimarer Land” presents itself as:

An interactive, visually strong platform
A high-quality editorial online magazine
A source of inspiration for short trips and holidays
A digital interface between storytelling and booking

The project demonstrates how regional tourism marketing can be modernized and sustainably strengthened through digital strategy.

Conclusion

With the digital travel magazine, a traditional print product was successfully transformed into a scalable, dynamic online format.

For us, this project exemplifies how strategic design, technical implementation, and performance marketing interlock — creating measurable added value together.

Planning Your Own Digital Relaunch?

Whether in tourism, mid-sized businesses, or growing companies:
We develop digital platforms that don’t just look good — they deliver measurable results.

Schedule a non-binding consultation today.

Push Marketing vs. Pull Marketing: A Comparison of Marketing Strategies

Lisa — Wed, 20 Mar 2024 14:04:24 +0000

With the popularity of online shopping and the constant accessibility of everyone, the opportunities in marketing have become more diverse. There are many strategies and ways to market a product or service and reach people. However, two concepts broadly summarize important online marketing strategies: push marketing and pull marketing. They play a significant role in the development of functional advertising strategies.

In this article, we explain the differences between push and pull marketing and provide examples to illustrate how companies can use them in their marketing communications.

The Difference Between Push and Pull Marketing

The goal of push and pull marketing is essentially the same: to reach as many potential customers as possible and persuade them to make a purchase. However, the strategies differ in their approach.

Push marketing, also known as “pressure marketing,” refers to a strategy where products or services are actively “pushed” to end customers. The aim is to communicate the offer as directly as possible to potential customers to promote sales.

Push marketing pursues a very aggressive way of advertising. Advertisements are used to make potential customers aware of a product. Typically, they have not heard of this product before. Thus, advertising is pushed onto users. Advertising, both online and offline, is suitable for this purpose. Push marketing is probably one of the oldest marketing concepts that still succeed today.

Pull marketing, also referred to as “attraction marketing,” aims to create demand for a product or service so that customers actively seek out and want to purchase the offer. This strategy focuses on building a brand and creating customer loyalty, leading to natural demand in the long term. Pull marketing often utilizes content and experiences that customers find valuable to generate interest and excitement for the brand.

With pull marketing, the emphasis is on targeting proactive customers who are already in search of a product like yours. These potential customers are “pulled” to your site, as they are already in the market for a product like yours. It’s crucial that your company is easily found online. There are various strategies to increase your visibility on the web, such as SEO, optimized landing pages, and optimized content.

How to Implement Push Marketing

Push marketing is ubiquitous in everyday life, seen and heard everywhere. Advertising on the radio, flyers in mailboxes, posters on billboards, and catalogs; all of these belong to push marketing. Various types of advertisements are used to encourage potential customers to make a purchase. First, they need to be made aware that your product exists. Simultaneously, the presentation ideally is so compelling that the desire to purchase also increases. In online marketing, social media ads play a crucial role in push marketing. This includes banner advertising on websites. However, newer advertising methods such as leveraging influencers can also increase brand awareness, depending on the product.

Examples of push marketing, whose participants are more likely to be higher up in the sales funnel (see AIDA model):

Social media marketing: Building a community around the brand that engages and retains customers through interaction and engagement.
Influencer marketing: Collaborating with influencers to promote products or services within their networks.
Trade shows and exhibitions: Presenting products in places where buyers actively seek solutions.
Email marketing: Targeted emails to a list of subscribers with the aim of promoting new products or offers.

ADVANTAGES	DISADVANTAGES
Greater reach compared to pull marketing	Potential customers may perceive the advertising as intrusive
Build reach quickly	One-way communication from the company
Introduce new products to the market that no one is actively searching for	Reach may be disrupted by ad blockers and filters

How to Implement Pull Marketing

Pull marketing is typically more subtle than push marketing. There are no ads urging people to buy products or use services. With pull marketing, you rely on the existing interest of potential customers. These individuals often use search engines to specifically look for a certain product. In most cases, they already have some knowledge or have made a preliminary selection. Through search engine optimization (SEO), you capture the attention of customers because your website appears among the top search results. Now, the goal is to keep users on your site and convince them of your product’s value. Blog posts, informative social media accounts, or whitepapers are popular forms of content for achieving this objective.

Examples of pull marketing, targeting participants who are typically further down the sales funnel (see AIDA model):

Content Marketing: Providing useful, informative, or entertaining content that naturally attracts potential customers, such as through search engines.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO): Optimizing the website and content to rank higher in search engine queries.
Search Engine Advertising (SEA): Placing ads in search engines to be found by interested customers.

ADVANTAGES	DISADVANTAGES
The customer is already searching for your product, and there is already a certain interest in purchasing.	Informative content with added value is more time-consuming to produce than ads.
Many opportunities to attract customers through organic results and maintain their interest.	If your product is unknown and nobody is searching for it, pull marketing is not suitable.

Differences between Push and Pull Marketing Summarized:

Audience targeting: Push marketing aims to reach a broad audience directly and often unsolicited. Pull marketing, on the other hand, builds relationships with a more specific audience that has already shown interest.
Communication approach: Push marketing relies on direct and often interruptive advertising formats, while pull marketing focuses on providing value and building relationships.
Time horizon: Push marketing can achieve short-term sales success, while pull marketing aims for long-term success through brand building, memory effects from repeated customer contacts, and customer retention.
Sales funnel: Push marketing is more commonly used above the funnel and at the Attention and Interest stages in the AIDA model, while pull marketing tends to focus more on the actual purchase stage at the Desire and Action stages in the AIDA model.

Is Push or Pull Marketing Right for Me?

Generally, every successful marketing strategy includes a mix of push and pull marketing campaigns with an overarching campaign structure. The ratio of how much you should use each strategy depends on several factors, including the online behavior of your target audience, the product, or the sales value. If your product is in high demand and already has a certain level of brand awareness, working more with pull marketing naturally makes sense. On the other hand, push marketing helps smaller, lesser-known brands generate more leads and sales with new products.

In any case, a marketing strategy should be developed. Using a marketing agency yields the greatest results. They bring experience and the necessary know-how to maximize the results from your advertising budget. Contact us today!

Our Top 3 Tips for Successfully Utilizing Google Ads

Lisa — Wed, 15 Sep 2021 13:19:37 +0000

The text or search ads in Google Ads, formerly known as Google AdWords, are very popular among online marketers. Many companies are interested in ranking high in Google search results to highlight their website or online shop for potential customers. We often receive inquiries from our customers about marketing measures with Google Ads. After all, 90% of internet users in Germany “google” things. It is said that approximately 60% of advertising expenses in online marketing are concentrated solely on Facebook and Google.

Tip 1 – The Right Campaign Structure: Properly Define Topics for Google Ads
Tip 2 – Choose the Right Landing Page for Your Google Ads
Tip 3 – Choose the Right Keywords for Your Google Ads

What Are Google Ads?

A Google text ad highlights your website or online shop in the search results of the search engine Google. When users enter specific keywords or key phrases on Google, they are shown up to 4 ads at the top or up to 3 ads from your company below the organic search results. These ads resemble organic search results and are marked with the label “Ad.” If this text ad is appealing and formulated effectively, it prompts potential customers to click on it, leading them to your website or online shop, where ideally they purchase your service or product.

Search engine advertising with Google Ads is an excellent complement to search engine optimization for most businesses. This allows you to quickly and effectively position yourself at the top of search results for your desired keywords.

During implementation, there are some mistakes you can make that can quickly turn promising Google Ads search ads into money-wasters. However, if you follow our tips below, you have a good chance of attracting the right users to your site.

Tip 1 - The Right Campaign Structure: Properly Define Topics for Google Ads

In the Google Ads accounts of our clients, we often see different services or products being promoted together in one campaign and ad group. In other words, various products are advertised with many different keywords under a kind of “standard search ad.”

This leads to the keywords in your Google Ads campaign receiving a poor quality score. They simply do not perfectly match your ad and landing page.

This means: The cost per click you have to pay for clicking on a keyword is comparatively higher than for a keyword with a good quality score.

And this results in:

The ads being displayed less frequently.
The ads having poorer chances of appearing in the good, top positions in Google search results.
The text ads being clicked on less by searchers because they do not precisely match the search query.

If you want to promote different products or services, then use a separate ad group for each of the different products and services. In the ad group, use keywords and ad texts tailored to the respective theme. This ensures that the content of the ads and your chosen landing page always perfectly match the search queries. And they will be clicked on more willingly. Google Ads rewards this with a higher quality score and better click prices. Because the landing page also contributes to the quality score.

But more on that in the following.

Tip 2 - Choose the Right Landing Page for Your Google Ads

What is a Landing Page?

In your Google Ads search ads, you specify a destination page. This is the landing page to which users are redirected after clicking on the ad. According to this definition, a landing page is simply the webpage or subpage where your potential customers “land.” In principle, this can be any page of your entire website.

Therefore, the homepage is not always the best solution as a landing page. Especially if interested users then have to navigate through the website to find the advertised offer. Because it often only provides an overview of all products or services. The more clicks interested users are away from the offer, the higher the likelihood that they will bounce before completing any action. This increases your bounce rate, potentially causing you to lose paid users immediately.

Furthermore, Google Ads compares the texts of your ads with the texts of the landing page. The better the alignment of both in terms of content, the better the quality score, and the more often Google will display your ad, and the lower the click prices will be. This potentially increases ad impressions, clicks, and the chance of more inquiries or orders.

Why is a Call-To-Action So Important?

Therefore, it’s crucial that every destination page used in your ads also includes a call-to-action. This destination page can also be referred to as an offer page or landing page. The call-to-action is a recommendation or invitation to take action. Essentially, any page of your website can be a landing page.

This is particularly important in organic search results (in search engine optimization) because searchers do not all arrive at your homepage. Instead, they land on the subpage of your website that best matches the keyword and has been matched in the search results. As an agency, we recommend adding a call-to-action to every page of your website.

Not every website visitor will become a customer, even if the Google ads are perfectly crafted and the landing page is optimally designed. It’s always possible that visitors may not make a decision and continue searching.

With a click-through rate (CTR) of approximately 3 to 5%, you can expect a good response rate to your Google ads. The conversion rate needs to be tested individually and varies depending on the offer/industry. Conversion rate refers to how many out of 100 website visitors will contact you or purchase your product through the online shop or website. There are many factors that influence the conversion rate. For example, the rate is usually lower for online shops, starting at around 2-3%, while it can be higher for regional service providers or niche providers.

Tip 3 - Choose the Right Keywords for Your Google Ads

Keyword Analysis

In Google Ads, everything revolves around the right keywords. With the keywords set in the campaigns, you control which search queries your ads will be displayed for. Therefore, when setting up Google Ads campaigns and deciding on the structure of the campaigns and ad groups, you start with comprehensive and thorough keyword research. A Google Ads agency can assist you with this. Because if you haven’t found all the keywords, you might miss out on important search queries where your ads could be displayed.

If you include keywords that don’t properly match your offerings, your Google Ads ads will be displayed too often for irrelevant search queries. This means you’ll get too many clicks for search queries that don’t match your product or service. Worse still, your daily budget may be exhausted too early, leaving you with no budget for the right search queries.

When creating an ad group, Google provides many suggestions for the keyword list. It’s important to choose carefully: Would my customers actually enter these words or search phrases to find my product? The right keywords are usually the obvious and specific search phrases that the general public uses, rather than technical terms. Broadly related keywords won’t help you much here.

Therefore, keyword options are crucial.

Keyword Options

It’s particularly important to use the so-called keyword options when entering your keywords into the Google Ads system. By default, Google Ads suggests the keyword option “broad match” for keywords. With this keyword option, your ads will be displayed by Google for all possible synonyms and broadly related search queries. This is a situation where your valuable daily budget is likely to be exhausted too early in the day without reaching relevant search queries.

Missing keyword options are the most common mistakes and cost drivers we see as an agency in Google Ads accounts. Usually, this occurs when a client complains that Google Ads haven’t produced any results so far or that too much budget is required for the ads.

In Google Ads, there are three keyword options to choose from, which I’ll also explain along with the characters to use in Google Ads:

Broad match
“Phrase match”
[Exact match]

This Google Help article explains how to use these keyword options correctly in detail.

Regular Optimization

Once your Google Ads search campaign is up and running, the first important step is done: Now begins the hard work: the regular monitoring, evaluation, and optimization of your campaigns, ad groups, and keywords.

Regularly review your Google ads and monitor their performance, for example in Google Analytics or Matomo as a web analytics tool. Compare the click-through rates and conversions of your different ad groups, text ads, and keywords with each other, and continuously try out new alternatives.

Stay on Top

The requirements for search engine advertising change constantly, along with the opportunities in Google Ads marketing. New options are regularly introduced, while others are removed. Therefore, it is recommended to stay informed about updates in Google Ads and keep up to date.

The proper creation and ongoing maintenance of successful Google Ads campaigns require a lot of experience and time. See here our certification for “Google Ads Search Engine Advertising. This can quickly become overwhelming—especially if it’s not your core competency or daily business. To make the most of your campaigns in the future as effectively and efficiently as possible, we recommend seeking operational support from a SEA agency and Google Ads partner agency, such as us.

We, at Okon Schwarz Advertising Agency, look forward to getting to know you.