It may sound weird when the goal of a marketing activity is not to sell itself. However, indirect marketing aims not to sell but to raise brand awareness and build business relationships with potential customers.

Marketers apply indirect marketing to hook potential customers who might buy the product down the road.

In this post, you will find out everything you need to know about indirect marketing.

Let’s start!

Three Types of Indirect Marketing

There are three main types of indirect marketing. Let’s review these types:

● Social media channels

Social media channels aim to share information with the audience. When content helps people solve their problems, they start following you across social channels. It works well to raise brand awareness and build relationships with your target audience.

For example, Moz has an account on Twitter with 569.6K followers. The team behind Moz shares problem-solving pieces of advice with the audience. These tips don’t have a purpose to sell but help with useful information.

This type of indirect marketing embraces all possible social media channels. Plus, many various services and tools (like Social media scheduler) can help improve the quality of your activity on social media. For instance, Instagram scheduler allows you to post content following the time that works best for your target audience.

● Public relations

The goal of PR is to influence an audience’s perception of your brand. It is possible via communication with the public and media.

How to do this to get more results?

Here are a few pieces of advice:

• Reach out to journalists and cooperate
• Explore and respond to media inquiries
• Publish press releases
• Create newsworthy content

● SEO

The goal of search engine optimization (SEO) is to help optimize a website to rank it better on search engines. In other words, you help appear your target pages in the SERP for relevant keywords by doing SEO.

However, if nobody knows about your brand – you should build a bridge like “niche-related keywords – your product” and help people convert into customers.

Pros and Cons of Indirect Marketing

It would be fair to ask – does it make sense to invest in indirect marketing?

To get an idea, you should know the pros and cons of indirect marketing.

Pros:

• It works great for raising awareness and demand

The first stage of a digital marketing funnel is “awareness.” Why is the “awareness” stage so important?

There are tons of people who are ready to buy from you right off the bat. However, these potential customers might not know about the problem they have. Or they don’t know the solution to the problem they already are aware of.

That is when indirect marketing enters the game. It helps embrace more people and get them interested in your product for the future.

• It doesn’t create any pressure on potential customers

You spread the word on how your product helps solve the customers’ issues via content. People decide for themselves whether to read it or not.

Cons:

• It is time-consuming

It requires time to raise brand awareness. You can’t do this shortly. Just like it is merely possible to acquire a few thousand followers across social media channels during a day.

• It is hard to track

People buy things without consideration quite rarely. Therefore, you won’t be able to know whether you got a new customer thanks to your indirect marketing activities.

Now, let’s compare indirect marketing with direct one.

Pros and Cons of Direct Marketing

The same question might appear in your head – does it make sense to invest in direct marketing?

Let’s review the pros and cons of direct marketing to answer this question.

Pros:

• You can measure direct marketing easily

Applying direct marketing tactics allows you to track results. You can see the exact number of clicks, opens, traffic, and conversions. Plus, you use additional services that measure data as well.

• Direct marketing delivers quick results

The goal of direct marketing is to make more sales. Hence, you will use tactics that force people to convert with enthusiasm.

Cons:

• It creates pressure on potential customers

One of the most usable tactics of direct marketing is cold email outreach. It works really irritating for potential customers. People don’t like when brands are trying to sell them anything forcedly.

• It has a narrow reach

Direct marketing tends to give a final nudge to people ready to buy from you. However, it has less impact on people in the first stage of the marketing funnel.

To Conclude

Don’t delude yourself by thinking that you can use only indirect marketing and you will succeed. Nope. You should mix indirect and direct marketing strategies. This is the only recipe for getting successful results.

If you think this post lacks a more informative piece of advice, feel free to share your thoughts in the comments.