Direct Marketing Vs Indirect Marketing: The Difference

Before jumping into the main topic, I do need to explain what marketing is.

Marketing is the process of planning and executing the conception, pricing, promotion, and distribution of ideas, goods, and services to create exchanges that satisfy individual and organizational objectives.

Marketing is used in almost every single business. It is usually what sets businesses apart from one another in terms of product quality or service offerings. 

Marketing can be all-inclusive with many aspects such as advertising campaigns, public relations efforts, business development activities, designing marketing campaigns for specific target audiences etc.

Usually the business owner and/or the entrepreneur are involved with the marketing strategies but the one who leads to implement and execute the strategies is the marketing department to grow the companies wallet.

Marketers are the one who decide based on their experience, campaign numbers and a/b testing which type of marketing approach can result better for the business offer: direct marketing or indirect marketing.

Marketers can also do a blend of both types of marketing as long as they are breaking even or bringing in profit, because no business likes to lose profit when it comes to paid advertising.

Outside of paid advertising there is organic marketing, which means creating content such as blog posts, podcasting or even doing Youtube videos to drive viewers and readers to your website or landing page to make them an offer relevant to the content they’ve been exposed to.

Today in this blog, we will be focusing on the differences between direct marketing and indirect marketing and how to combine them both.

What is Direct Marketing?

Direct marketing is a form of direct communication with a target audience, one on one. 

Communication is an exchange of thoughts, ideas, or feelings. When direct marketing occurs, the messages are delivered in the most efficient and effective manner.

Old school direct marketing can be: catalogs, newspapers, magazines, television commercials, radio promos, billboards and direct mailings.

Modern direct marketing is: email marketing, phone calls, text messages, video chats, direct mailers, mobile marketing, push notifications, social media marketing, going live on social media, etc.

This is also known as outbound marketing where the marketer is reaching out to his ideal audience to provide valuable information to peak the customer’s interest about the product or service their offering so they can engage in a one on one conversation with them.

Usually when the business knows their target audience with this method it should be quicker to generate new potential customers and weed out the leads they do not want.

A great example would be like the one funnel away challenge.

They want to help out new entrepreneurs and businesses understand why websites are a thing of the past and why funnels are the greatest thing since sliced bread to acquire more customers and more sales.

When there is a two way conversation between the seller and future prospect it quickly increases the chances of a conversion because of a personal connection touch point.

What Is Indirect Marketing?

Indirect marketing is a technique for reaching out to customers without them knowing that they are being targeted. It is very common and an important technique in the fields of marketing and advertising.

The purpose of indirect marketing is to get potential customers to notice the product without them actually buying it at first sight.

A physical product example can be like when you walk into a Walmart store and they offer you a free sample of cheese or new brand of soda.

If you like it, the chances of you buying it there at the moment increases dramatically because you already know what it tastes like.

A digital product example would be downloading a free pdf file. If you feel that the content was very valuable information and useful information, there is a high chance that you’d go back to them to buy one of their digital products.

Email marketing is another example of indirect marketing techniques.

The sender usually makes a marketing campaign and drips out anywhere from 3-5 emails and each one of them targets a desire or fear to persuade you to get the offer, usually within a limited time offer.

For last, a free tool that can help everyone out with this method by creating content marketing is ubersuggest.

By seeing what people are typing on the internet, we can tailor our message to those people who are searching for something to buy with google search engines.

Indirect marketing is persuasion, the process of influencing another person to change their mind or behavior to favor you.

The Difference Between Direct & Indirect?

Both direct and indirect marketing are effective when used properly. 

The key difference between them is that direct marketing tells the customer what they need to do, while indirect methods make customers want a product without telling them how they can get it.

Also, one can be more expensive than the other one, one can use paid advertisement while the other one can use it as a method to attract traffic organically without spending on ads.

Overall, most businesses as well as entrepreneurs implement both methods simultaneously to reach more potential leads to turn them into hot buyers, then to loyal customers.

The Advantages Of Combining Both Methods

The advantages of combining direct marketing and indirect marketing are that it can be more cost-effective, more efficient, and allows for better targeting.

An example can be exposing your Facebook ad to download a free exclusive “podcast cheat sheet” to a new audience by using direct marketing and when they subscribe to your email list, keep feeding them more information about the offer they subscribe to.

The indirect marketing method would be showing them through persuasion how awesome it is to have a personal studio setup with awesome gear and what platform they should use to reach a bigger audience.

This can be done with an email marketing campaign sequence.

Implementing these two methods can take your key performance indicators to the next level.

Conclusion

Indirect marketing and direct marketing work hand in hand when it comes to promoting a service and/or product.

One is used to place the product in the customer's sight as the other one persuades the customer how awesome and cool it would look in their life.

The only time they would work individually is by doing multiple A/B split tests, to focus more on the conversion rate and figure out how to bring in the other type of marketing to increase sales even more.