Marketing is a key area that helps the success of any product or service. Based on the customer approach to the customers, marketing can be divided into two categories: Direct marketing and indirect marketing.
Indirect marketing can be identified as a value-driven marketing method that focuses on promoting a brand, product, or service provided by a business. This is expected to be done without being obviously “promotional”. In other words, indirect marketing is expecting to attract the potential customer attention for the product or the service through a gentle approach.
In a traditional context, the marketing division of any business is planning to reach the target market directly through newsletters, telemarketing, email marketing, and meeting the customers directly. It was expected to catch the direct customer attention for the products by giving a personal touch to the marketing campaign.
However, indirect marketing focuses on approaching customers differently, using indirect marketing channels such as social media, blogging, PR, referrals or word of mouth, content marketing, and search engine optimization.
Social Media
Social media is considered one of the most used communication methods that are used in the modern world. Due to its low cost and the ability to reach a bigger audience, social media is considered one of the most cost-effective indirect marketing methods. It helps the marketing team to convert the leads to their customers and also it helps the business to build and maintain a positive relationship with existing and potential customers.
However, the key success point in using social media for indirect marketing is to emphasize the value-added benefits of the product continuously. It helps the customer awareness of the product as well as it creates a need in the customer to experience the value additions.
Apart from that, the customer experience and feedback can be used to approach more markets as well. If a happy customer posts positive feedback about the product on social media, it helps to attract more customers to the product.
Content Marketing
Content marketing is a value-added content creation that will entertain, educate and inform necessary details to the potential customers about the product. This is used as a way of getting the customer’s attention rather than approaching customers directly with the product details.
Content marketing is used as a way of educating not only the potential customers but also the existing customers in the business. It helps to create awareness of the functions, added benefits, and the ways of using the product to get maximum benefit. It makes the brand or the product looks more empathetic and supportive towards the customers. The commonly seen examples for content marketing are,
- Blog Posts
- Video contents/ Vlogging
- Quiz competitions
- Podcasts
- Games
- Live events
Public Relations (PR)
It is important for any brand, product, or service to gain customers’ trust if they are planning to survive in the market. If the product or the service is successful in achieving something trustworthy for the customers, it helps the product to increase its credibility in the market automatically. Since the customers in the modern world are more informative than old days, it can create a good impact on the product or the service.
The marketing team has to interact with the public and build a credible relationship with the existing and potential customers in order to achieve a competitive advantage in the market. Public relations are very important for indirect marketing due to this reason. If the business is continuously getting highlighted in the target market for a good and positive reason, the customer attraction can be high for that product without much effort from the marketing team. To increase the PR, businesses can partner with other businesses as well.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Search engine optimization is about making the content or the website available in Google’s top searches. For this, the business should have unique and value-added content to get the content or the website to the top. This can be used mostly for businesses who are specialized in online selling.