Push vs. Pull Marketing — What They Are and Why Law Firms Should Use Both

Written By Meg Pritchard, Principal and Founder

Effective legal marketing requires determining the right mix of marketing tactics and strategies for your firm. One way to sift through the options is to look at them in terms of push vs. pull marketing. Push marketing — sometimes called outbound marketing — involves proactively reaching out to potential clients and referral sources, presenting them with tailored content designed to capture their interest. On the other hand, pull — or inbound — marketing focuses on drawing clients to your firm by offering valuable content that addresses their needs and interests. For law firms, an approach that combines both can be a robust and effective strategy.

Push marketing

Push or outbound marketing includes any marketing efforts to reach potential clients and referral sources by “pushing” your message to them. Essentially, push marketing means reaching out to audiences you’ve identified and offering content designed to appeal to them. Examples of push marketing include email alerts and newsletters as well as paid advertising, including in traditional or digital media, such as paid Google or social media ads.

Push marketing such as paid advertising can be used to extend your messaging reach to larger audiences, in the hope that at least some of them may want to know about your service offerings. Casting a wider net may be useful if you don’t have the ability to do outbound marketing directly to more targeted audiences.

Outbound marketing also can be designed to be narrower and more targeted, such as in the case of email campaigns where alerts and newsletters are delivered directly into the inboxes of people with whom your firm or lawyers already have some relationship. With the appropriate CRM technology, direct email campaigns can be segmented according to interests or by specific categories.

Pros of push marketing include the ability to quickly reach audiences that may not (yet) know about your firm, with the potential for generating new client leads. In the case of direct or email marketing, push marketing allows you to focus your messaging on specific segments of clients, prospects and referrals and get people’s attention where they most typically are (in their inboxes or on their social media accounts) rather than waiting for them to find you.

On the cons side, paid advertising can be costly and has the potential to be inefficient, using resources perhaps better used elsewhere to push messaging to poorly targeted, uninterested or wrong audiences. Direct outbound marketing through email campaigns can also be resource intensive, and has the potential for content to get lost or be ignored in the avalanche of emails that land in people’s inboxes every day.

Pull or inbound marketing

With pull or inbound marketing, you’re taking the opposite approach, inviting clients and prospects to come to you, often by regularly offering content that provides value, whether it’s information, education or entertainment (or some combination of the three). Examples of pull or inbound marketing include substantive content — blogs, alerts, newsletters, videos, podcasts, FAQs, resource guides, white papers and other thought leadership — that lives on your firm’s website or other owned platforms. Social media — posting or publishing content on platforms such as LinkedIn (as distinct from paid digital advertising) — is also pull marketing. Your firm’s website, including practice pages, bios and more traditional marketing content, as well as news, awards and recognitions; reviews and testimonials; and other announcements you publish, falls into the category of inbound marketing as well. And, of course, employing SEO best practices to optimize your content so that more potential clients see it can and should be an element of your firm’s inbound marketing strategy.

Pull or inbound marketing is particularly effective for building and maintaining the kinds of trust-based relationships with both existing clients and prospects that are essential for law firm marketing. It can be resource intensive in terms of creating a regular flow of content that provides authoritative insight, however. Because it’s a more indirect form of content marketing, it can take longer to see results, and it’s often difficult to ascribe business directly to a particular piece of marketing content.

Law firms need both push and pull marketing

Although push/outbound and pull/inbound marketing are two distinct strategies, leveraging elements of both can be a robust and effective overall marketing strategy. For example, the reach and impact of substantive content published in blogs and on your firm’s website (pull/inbound marketing) can be amplified and enhanced by a companion email (push/outbound) campaign. Participating in legal content aggregation programs such as Lexology can push your content to audiences that you might not otherwise reach organically, and paid Google advertising can augment your SEO efforts.

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Meg Pritchard, Principal and Founder

I’m Meg—a lawyer, writer and editor, and marketing professional who understands the content marketing challenges facing law firms in today’s competitive—and cluttered—marketplace. I founded Create Communications in 2011 to serve as an outsourced resource for law firms that want to harness the power of branded content and thought leadership in their marketing and business development. When you work with us, you get a hand-picked team of kick-ass writers and editors with legal, journalism, business and marketing experience who believe that exceptional content can be the rocket fuel that powers business growth. We’re committed to defying your expectations, every time.

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