There are two different types of marketing techniques: push or pull. Push marketing is used to promote a message in front of an audience, regardless of the audience’s active search for that message. Pull marketing is used to find and capture an audience that is already looking for your message.
All legal recruitment firms should be using push marketing strategies to land high-value candidates and clients. Push marketing through digital mediums can yield high ROI, allows you to target specific groups or regions, and can integrate into a more robust marketing strategy. Read on to learn how to you can deploy digital push marketing alongside your current marketing efforts.
Push vs. Pull Marketing
Before we begin a thorough examination of push marketing, it makes sense to contrast it with pull marketing. The first distinction between pull vs push marketing lies in the target audiences. As we alluded to in the opening paragraph, push marketing seeks to engage a disinterested market, whereas pull marketing aims at one already interested in a specific product or field. The main prerequisite of pull marketing is that potential customers should be seeking out the kind of good or service already provided by the company, and the only thing they need to focus on is the company’s offerings. Push marketing deals with a largely unaware demographic.
The next is that these two kinds of marketing work better for different types of businesses. A pull marketing strategy is most appropriate for companies that are generally already known, at least by a specific demographic. Why? Because pull strategies target an already interested constituency, it follows that this group is already aware of the company’s existence and what it does. A push strategy in marketing functions exactly the opposite. Though a business should have a specific target in mind, it takes a far broader approach, actively placing the organization and its products or services in front of an audience. The push promotional strategy works well for non-established businesses or products, campaigns that require fast results, and when directly competing with other firms.
To learn more about pull marketing in the legal area, read our article here.
The relationship between push marketing and lead generation
A push marketing strategy will often be praised as a way to quickly generate leads, and there’s truth in that assertion. Pull marketing inherently relies on interested third parties and prior knowledge of one’s firm. While this type of marketing certainly will create potential convertible contacts, much of its success relies on factors outside of a firm’s control. Push marketing efforts (e.g., advertising) are very much within a company’s control — but they may not always generate quality leads.
To understand this, it helps to know the difference between demand generation and lead generation. The former involves simply promoting the existence of your business, trumpeting what it does and how it does it. This can cause leads to migrate to your firm, but it’s far less reliable. Lead generation proper in push marketing involves a call to action and seeks to gather information from those receiving marketing communications with the goal of turning them into clients.
Introducing Digital Push Marketing
In the “old days”, push marketing was done via newspaper and magazine ads, or direct mail sales letters. As a legal recruiter, examples of push marketing would be cold-calling lawyer candidates on the phone or handing out brochures about your agency to attendees at a law school job fair.
Although those tactics still work sometimes, today’s Digital Age requires some equally high-tech push marketing strategies to attract high-profile clients and candidates. Examples of digital push marketing techniques include:
- Display advertising
- Prospecting emails
- Online brochures
- Text and logo display advertising
These forms of digital advertising are intended to get your brand in front of potential and new prospects who may have never used your recruitment agency before. This ensures that you are at the front of their mind among other legal recruiter options they may have. Even better, these methods can drive visits to your website. Once there, your site should be easy to navigate while accurately presenting your branding message to visitors- both of which a digital marketing agency can assist you with.
Display Advertising
Display advertising consists of visual advertisements. These can be ads on the Google Display Network or other display networks, as well as static banners or interactive flash and video ads. Display ads are used for delivering general brand messages and are the digital equivalent to billboard ads.
Digital display ads, as opposed to billboards, have the added bonus of advanced targeting. Your digital marketing company can place ads in publications that are specific to the attorneys or decision makers that legal recruiters want to build trust with.
With the ability to advertise your legal recruiting brand’s message on content that your prospects and candidates are reading, you can begin building trust and brand recognition. This gives you a competitive edge over other recruiters who only begin this process of trust building when the candidate or employer is looking for recruitment services.
Demographic Targeting Through LinkedIn and Facebook
Demographics are used in marketing, advertising, and politics to target a specific segment of the American population. When you’re looking to get a higher return-on-investment for your recruiting budget, a reliable DM agency can help you use demographic targeting to attract and land talented attorney candidates by placing Facebook or LinkedIn ads catered specifically to them.
Some of the demographic factors relevant to legal recruiters that can be targeted on LinkedIn and Facebook include:
- Age
- Experience
- Occupation
- Education level
- Place of residence
A digital marketing company can use those demographic factors to identify the kind of candidates your legal recruitment agency excels at placing, and to push your job listings and your services to those candidates. You can also use those factors to hone in on decision makers that hire legal recruiters for their in-house hiring needs.
In the end, targeting candidates with the specific qualifications that your clients are looking for will position you as a high-value resource in their eyes. And being able to find employers with a potential need for a legal recruiter ensures that you can start a relationship with them by building your brand trust.
Integrated Marketing
Experienced DM agencies take an integrated marketing approach, which refers to a multi-channel, multi-strategy digital advertising strategy that’s designed to engage consumers on multiple online locations. The goal of an effective integrated digital marketing program is to seamlessly and powerfully promote your recruitment firm by:
- Analyzing and addressing the user-friendliness of your website
- Owning Search Engine Results Pages for your key recruitment and brand searches using SEO and SEM
- Having an active LinkedIn presence, and other mediums when relevant (Facebook, Twitter)
- Placing your brand on different sites (legal blogs, Google for Jobs, etc.)
- Local listings management
Integrated digital marketing is not explicitly push marketing, as it also encompasses pull marketing and other strategies. The key importance of integrated marketing when it meets push marketing is that your digital marketing agency can help coordinate your push strategy across several different channels and mediums.
Having a good integrated push marketing strategy is important due to the explosive growth of the online advertising. Every day, your targeted audience is bombarded by ads which means that your legal recruitment firm must push a consistent message to get noticed. And, that’s where an experienced DM agency can make all the difference!
How is push marketing improving lead generation for firms?
When looking at the differences between a pull and push marketing strategy, it’s worth remembering that push marketing offers multiple benefits to firms, such as the following:
- Improved Visibility: Thanks to push marketing efforts, individuals not familiar with your firm now have knowledge of it.
- Localization: Push marketing allows you to focus on a specific area and a specific demographic.
- Data-Driven Marketing: The best forms of push marketing combine effective messages with applicable data, which helps convert contacts into leads.
Things to keep in mind while using push marketing
While push marketing might sound as though it works in any situation, successful push marketing involves essential prerequisites, such as:
- Understanding what people want
- Understanding when people want it
- Tailoring your message accordingly
Some push marketing ideas
Advertising, radio spots, print marketing, and social-media presence can all function as effective push marketing efforts. However, these are far from the only options available for a firm that’s looking to reach out and turn contacts into leads. Other messaging options might include highlighting open/available positions and discussing attractive salary and benefits packages.
Improve Online Visibility by Joining the Legal Recruiter Directory
Improving the online visibility of your legal recruitment agency is possible by joining the Legal Recruiter Directory. The LRD offers a variety of digital marketing strategies that will increase your local visibility and help you land high-value clients and candidates. Whether your target audience is captive or passive, the goal of the LRD is to help attorney headhunters connect talented lawyer candidates with potential employers so that all parties involved win. Learn more about the Legal Recruiter Directory now.
