Indirect marketing is arguably one of the best ways to market your business, regardless of size, budget, or industry.
Why?
Because indirect marketing helps businesses to increase awareness and affinity for their brand by creating intrigue around their story and makes the audiences want to find out more.
What is indirect marketing?
While direct marketing communication tends to focus on asking your audience to take a particular action, indirect marketing focuses much more on providing useful information that builds trust and loyalty for your brand.
Some examples of these include:
- Search Engine Optimization that provides your audience with content and solutions relevant to their search query
- Organic social media posting that allow your audience to engage with your brand without any monetary transaction
- Reviews from previous customers that enable them to express their opinions and inform both your brand and potential new customers about any shortcomings or major benefits
- Collaboration with other brands that are relevant to your audience can raise awareness with new users and increase your standing as a high quality brand.
- Creating useful articles and blog posts that are designed to help your audience with relevant problems they might be facing – allowing them to access your expertise without paying and thus building trust and loyalty for you brand.
Why use indirect marketing?
Indirect marketing often generates higher long-term results for businesses
Since indirect marketing focuses on building brand awareness and affinity, it usually results in a loyal long-term customer base rather than one-time converters.
By building brand awareness through indirect marketing methods, your business can be with them from the early stages of their buyer journey and increase the likelihood of them choosing you when they’re ready to convert.
Indirect marketing can be a highly cost-effective method of marketing your business
The materials created through indirect marketing (e.g. social media posts, blogs, and high-ranking websites) are not limited to one particular audience and can reach anyone – as opposed to reaching only those that are targeted via ads, emails, or messages. These materials can also be found at any time meaning that you can continue to see a return on your activity long into the future e.g. a blog post you create today can still be read by a potential customer in 18 months’ time.
This, combined with the fact there are no ad budgets to consider, make indirect marketing a very cost-effective form of marketing for SMEs and large organisations alike.
Indirect marketing provides a better customer experience
Indirect marketing techniques such as social media posting or customer reviews are more subtle than direct marketing techniques like targeted messages and ads – ultimately making the customer experience less disruptive and more enjoyable.
This is crucial in modern marketing as customers hate being sold to – especially when it feels like an interruption in their already busy lives.
Indirect marketing is heavily geared towards increasing brand awareness and affinity by building trust with your audience over time. While direct marketing can also be used for this purpose, it is often much harder and much more expensive to convert a user who has no awareness of your brand, services or products. By utilising indirect marketing tactics early on in the customer journey, you can achieve greater success and lower costs by re-targeting users who have engaged in these areas with direct marketing in the later stages of the journey.
For support and guidance with your indirect and direct marketing activities follow us on LinkedIn for our latest articles or get in touch with our team.
