Pull Marketing

In technical services, great work often goes unnoticed without proactive outreach. But traditional push marketing—cold emails, ads, and proposals—can feel impersonal or ineffective. Pull marketing offers an alternative: it attracts clients to you by making your team’s expertise visible, approachable, and engaging. This article explores what pull marketing means in a technical context and why it works so well in industries where differentiation is difficult.

This series reveals how to use pull marketing to strategically shape the “picture” clients hold of your firm. Beyond proposals, it offers fresh, varied strategies that show your expertise, integrity, adaptability, and priorities. From virtual tours and student competitions to targeted social content and meaningful giveaways, each idea is designed to help clients assess your value and strengthen long-term relationships.

This set offers 20 diverse pull marketing ideas to help you shape the “picture” clients have of your firm. Ranging from large-scale community events to simple, low-cost social media strategies, each scenario invites you to weigh the budget, resources, and alignment with your goals. You’ll build strategic thinking skills, learn to prioritize high-value opportunities, and understand how every interaction can strengthen trust, credibility, and your competitive position.

Each interaction with your client paints a “picture” inside their head of your firm’s strengths and limits. That picture decides how they describe you to others, how they assess your proposals, and whether they’re confident assigning future work to your team. This exercise helps your team plan pull marketing strategies that allow you to take control of that picture, to grab hold of the paintbrush, as it were. The exercise comes with several other units on the subject of pull marketing, including a template that supports the exercise.

The Pull Marketing series reveals how to use pull marketing to strategically shape the “picture” clients hold of your firm. Beyond proposals, it offers fresh, varied strategies that show your expertise, integrity, adaptability, and priorities. This template supports the Pull Marketing Planning Exercise described in the What is Pull Marketing Video.