How to Leverage the Power of Indirect Marketing

Indirect marketing is the solution. It’s a form of promotion for your business that focuses not on making a quick sale, but on winning audience trust.

Businesses are finding that indirect marketing, like word-of-mouth and influencer marketing, is more effective than traditional advertising methods in reaching customers online. This article will explore how you can use indirect marketing techniques to improve sales and brand recognition.

Just What is Indirect Marketing, Anyway?

Indirect marketing is a way for a business to market their product, idea, or service without having to use the methods of SPAM or direct advertising and marketing. The idea behind indirect marketing is instead of sending a message out to your target market directly, just send them something like a friend request, or a vote, or a digg, or anything to get their attention.

Once they see who you are and go to find out more about you, they then see your advertisement or links to places you want them to go. If you give them more incentive to interact with you, they will be more likely to do so.

Why Does Indirect Marketing Matter?

Consumers see thousands of ads every day from various types of digital marketing that brands use. Google alone brought in advertising revenue that topped $134 billion in 2019 with PPC ads:

The endless stream of advertisements can be very tiring for consumers, and many of us have learned to ignore them. Many people use tools like ad blockers in order to reduce the amount of ads that they see. Indirect marketing allows you to get your brand seen without contributing to the already large number of blocked ads.

How to Leverage the Power of Indirect Marketing

If you bombard your customers with demands, it’s not only annoying, but it’s also not a good business strategy. Instead of intrusive ads and direct mail, indirect marketing can be used. This offers you three opportunities that direct marketing doesn’t:

• The opportunity to build trust
• The opportunity to develop customer loyalty
• An effective avenue for brand recognition

In this section, we will explore seven ways you can use indirect marketing techniques to draw potential customers into your sales funnel and keep them from backing out.

1. Social media

Social media is everywhere in the modern world and you either love it or hate it. Social media is also a problem for many users because of the amount of digital ads. Even though social media marketing may not be effective for some businesses, that doesn’t mean it should be avoided entirely. You just need to be smart in how you do it.

Social media can be used as a platform to share high-quality content with your followers. You can connect with your audience on Facebook, YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram by sharing informative content and interacting with them directly. This will help you get to know them better and build a stronger connection. This is a type of marketing where you create content that is specifically designed to be shared on social media platforms.

Social media posts can be designed relatively quickly and with limited resources, compared to other direct marketing channels such as direct mail, sales calls, and PPC. Make sure to pay attention to your social media analytics to ensure your actions are having the desired effect.

2. Word-of-mouth marketing and referrals

Even in the digital age, word-of-mouth marketing is very effective. Why? People are more likely to trust recommendations from people they know than they are to trust traditional advertising.

It’s important to invest time in developing relationships, getting to know people, and creating a customer base that is loyal to your brand. online networking lets you create relationships that are real, talk about topics that are related to the services you offer, and encourage people who are interested in what you do to check out your brand.

A large portion of the people you encounter will never require your assistance. That doesn’t mean the time was wasted! If your colleagues know and trust you, they will be more likely to recommend you to others when they need someone with your skillset.

One way to get people to organically share your products and services is to have interactive forms that make it easy for customers to share with their friends and family.

Word-of-mouth advertising can’t be forced. Making friends as an adult can be difficult and require effort to find common interests and meet up regularly. If you represent yourself as a professional and welcoming face of your brand, you will find that those in your network will be willing to tell their friends about you.

Referral sales are when existing customers recommend your product or service to new customers. In the United States, companies say that an average of 65 percent of new sales come from referrals. A customer’s personal experience is always more effective than a brand’s claim of being the best, intrusive sales pitches and telemarketing. This is because customers trust their own experiences more than they trust a brand’s advertising.

To fully take advantage of this, you need to offer amazing customer service. If your product or customer service is terrible, your customers will tell their friends. A strong referral system can have a big impact on a small business, either positive or negative.

3. Free content

Who doesn’t love free stuff? Quality content that is free is a great way to indirectly market something. Content marketing involves creating and sharing various types of content (such as videos, articles, blogs, and podcasts) in order to promote a product or service.

Your brand’s content can be both informative and entertaining, showcasing your brand’s value and purpose.

Many brands also use long-form articles to educate their audience, providing detailed information and analysis of a topic, or a comprehensive how-to guide. This type of informative content helps website visitors answer a specific question or solve a particular problem.

Here are a few other types of content you might like to try:

• Industry news and views
• Quizzes
• Visual content such as charts, graphs, and infographics
• Video testimonials
• Interviews with leading experts

Content can be used to drive leads and customers to your business more easily than you might think. Don’t be afraid to try different things and see what gets the best response from your audience.

4. Search Engine Optimization

The foundation of all your marketing efforts should be based on good SEO practices. There are many factors to consider when optimizing a website for search engines, from choosing the right keywords to making sure all images and H1 tags are properly formatted. SEO can be a complex and time-consuming process, but it is essential for any business that wants to be more visible online.

SEO is important because it allows people to find you easily on the internet. Here are a few quick SEO tips to help you get started:

• Use a plugin like Keywords Everywhere to choose long-tail, high search volume keywords to use.
• Build quality backlinks by writing guest posts for sites in your niche with a high domain authority.
• Add alt tags to all images, allowing Google to crawl them and understand what they contain.
• Reduce your server response time and page load speed for a faster website.

If you are a local real estate business, you need to take special SEO considerations into account. Some research indicates that a large majority of people who perform searches with local intent choose companies that appear on the first page of the search engine results page. An e-commerce website also has the best conversion rate among all channels as users come to the brand’s website for immediate solutions.

Here are a few local SEO tips:

• Create and optimize your Google My Business page
• Create on-site content which targets local keywords
• Build backlinks on relevant local and regional sites
• Ensure your business address is 100% consistent everywhere it appears

SEO is a long game. You won’t see your site’s ranking improve in the first week or month.