Marketing is an indispensable part of every business. Your product is only as good as how people perceive it to be – if they’re aware of it, that is.
While there are many marketing strategies, you can’t just randomly pick one and hope for the best. The right marketing strategy will depend on your budget, target audience, and location. Fortunately, there are many tried-and-tested marketing activities that work.
Simply put, indirect marketing engages with your target market, but not necessarily in a way that directly promotes your business or tries to boost sales. For instance, Nike’s indirect marketing campaigns highlight the importance of sports and breaking boundaries rather than selling their world-famous shoes per se.
Benefits of Indirect Marketing
Regardless of which industry you’re in, you can probably find a use for indirect marketing. Here are just a few of its benefits:
Appeals to a Large Audience
Social media marketing is a good example of indirect marketing. It appeals to a large group of people, including your ideal audience.
Even though the targeting is not specific, it still enables you to grow your brand awareness and perhaps even identify a new target audience in the process.
Requires a Low Initial Investment
You can run indirect marketing campaigns even with a small team or a limited budget. Since the content is largely a general message, there’s no need to conduct in-depth field research or collect tons of user data.
Here, you can just focus on creating relatable yet quality content for everyone.
Uses Subtle Messaging
This is one of the best things about indirect marketing. You’re not forcing your products or services on people, but rather setting up your brand as how you want people to perceive it. Whether it’s fun, reliable, luxurious, or whatever else, it’s more about eliciting specific feelings rather than hitting a specific quota.
Done right, indirect marketing can compel people to buy your products or services simply because they trust or like your brand.
Challenges of Indirect Marketing
Indirect marketing isn’t without its own pitfalls, such as:
Delayed Results
Not all businesses can afford to wait years before reaping the benefits of their indirect marketing campaigns. If you have strong competition, for instance, you cannot just rely on relatable or inspirational content to help promote your products. This situation may require a direct -and fast- approach.
Considerable Effort Required
Consistency is key, especially when it comes to marketing products and services. Using social media as a marketing platform is effective. However, sustaining such a campaign will require consistent effort and dedication. (Hiring a social media manager, though, can make this easier.)
Unpredictable Algorithms
Speaking of social media and search engine optimisations, their algorithms can be especially unpredictable, which can wreak havoc on your indirect marketing strategies. They also have a tendency to change without prior notice every now and then.
Hence, your carefully-crafted content may be effective today, but not so next week or next month. Thus, companies that can’t pivot fast enough can lose their hard-earned audience interaction and engagement levels almost overnight.
Indirect marketing can help you grow your business. It can help you reach a wider audience and most importantly, it won’t break the bank – if it’s done correctly. Best of all, you can complement it with other marketing strategies for optimal results.
Want to try indirect marketing, but not sure how to get started?
Remote Staff has been assisting Australian SME’s and entrepreneurs like you find and hire remote workers from the Philippines for the last 15 years and counting. So whether you need a social media manager to help you with indirect campaigns or an entire marketing team to come up with a strategy that works, we’ve got all of them on our roster.
Call us today or schedule a call back and let’s get started.
Serena has been working remotely and writing content for the better part of the last decade. To date, she's written for Pepper.ph and Mabuhay Magazine, among others, and has churned out more than a thousand articles on everything from The Basics of Stock Market Investing to How to Make Milk Tea-Flavored Taho at home.
