Indirect marketing is social media accounts, blogs, and newsletters, that don’t try and sell you anything. These tactics allow you to build customer trust and loyalty, and allows you to build a rapport with potential customers by not shoving pushy sales pitches on them when they are interacting with you!
In fact, positive interactions on social media can lead to your audience base being converted from just potential customers to potential brand evangelists. Indirect marketing leads to this by providing a personalized point of contact from your business to them. This conversion from customer to evangelist all by itself can lead to a huge increase in your return on the investments you have made (as explained in our blog here) and the best part about it is that it barely costs you anything!
The only cost normally associated with indirect marketing is the salary, or salaries, of the marketers (and marketing interns!) tasked with writing articles and working with whatever social media accounts you have, be it Facebook, Twitter, or one of the more visual services like Instagram.
There are downsides to indirect marketing tactics such as the time it takes to get yourself, or your business, well established on whichever social media platform you choose. There are a great many sources on how to market on social media (ours is here), and there are always more popping up, but it can take some time to get used to the ins and outs of things like hashtags and search engine optimization.
Another downside is the difficulty you may find yourself having measuring results from these tactics. A retweet, or a reblog, never necessarily means that the person is interested in buying your product or service. Perhaps, though, if we can combine both direct marketing techniques, with information gleaned from indirect marketing techniques, we can find ourselves in a happy land full of usable data that will provide a great benefit to your business!