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. One thing I do to get people to click on my profile is make an interesting profile name that appeals to my target market. One of the main ideas is that you should not appear as if you are a marketer. At the least, it should be questionable to your viewers whether or not you are marketing the things that you are providing links to. This is, of course, optional, but I’ve seen better results posting on a profile as some girl rather than posting as my actual company.
An Example of Good Indirect Marketing
Let’s say that you have a product (a new iphone video game) and a website for this product where people can easily sign up. Your target market is teenagers who are using a lot of texting products nowadays, and the people who are still in their 20’s and spend at least an hour playing video games per day. The most important thing with indirect marketing is to choose your niche and your target market first, and make it focused on exactly the type of people who will interact with you and possibly buy your product. For this market, you choose a couple of websites to target: Myspace, Twitter, Mixx’s gamers, and one very niched community, games.net.
Good Example:
user name: gamergalore
about me: I write game reviews for iphone games as they come out (includes links to your blog about games)
profile includes: about 5 reviews of different iphone games and at least one review of your game you’re trying to market
Bad Example:
user name: bob
about me: Get the latest awesome game on the iPhone! http://www.mygameurl.com
profile includes: a web banner for your game, and nothing else referencing any other iphone games. Buy now links, etc.
People just don’t respond well to the bad example. You will get little to no visitors clicking on your links to your site, whereas the good example will spark people’s curiosity in what you’re trying to sell because you (a supposed 3rd party) have already shown interest.
What About All of the Work It Takes to Build Your Market Reach?
There are a couple of things you could do to solve this issue:
- Find a person who already has good reach and ask them to post a link on one of their many online profiles
- Use an indirect marketing tool like webDOMinator to help you easily grow your reach each day on multiple fronts at the same time.
For the first option, you can always ask me if you could use my market reach. As of January 2009, I can reach about 20,000 people within a couple of days of running the tool I use, and make a good 32% of them come to the website over the next week.For the second option, this is what I actually use myself to perform my indirect marketing… it’s really nice because I just set it up to say add 2,000 follows on twitter, 1,000 more friends on mixx, and send out a couple hundred auto-votes on digg all simultaneously, and go out to party or have dinner, or sleep.
Indirect Marketing and SEO Go Hand-in-Hand
A good indirect marketing campaign uses good search engine optimization. It’s one of the things that allows you to cash in directly on your visits. One of the main reasons this is so is because you’re going to be providing links from multiple pages that are on high PageRank sites and hence the PageRank of your website will rise in the process. If you already have a good grasp on the other SEO techniques involved in a good SEO campaign, then you’re doing fine.
Does This Mean That Good Old Spamming Doesn’t Work?
No. Actually, spamming still works. The only problem with it is that social networks and bookmarking and chatter sites are starting to create their own tools to combat spam. Indirect Marketing is sort of an adaptation or evolution of spam that seeks to conform to the standards of most social networks so as not to get your accounts deleted and destroy your reach. Usually it also provides a better click-through rate than spam. Now, this is not to say don’t send out the occasional mass message to your followers or friends. This is healthy, but try to keep it down so that the site owners don’t catch on. When you send out a spammy message, try to make it actually relevant to the people you’re sending it to so that they don’t report you or actively work against you to get your profile deleted.
Conclusion
Here are some bullet points on how to start using indirect marketing to your advantage:
- Get an indirect marketing tool to work for you
- Create profiles on as many social networks and social bookmarking sites as you can
- Find niche networks that are small-to-medium sized for maximum exposure
- Provide good links or information on those profiles that’s seen as a resource to its users
- Each day, add friends, or vote, or whatever action, as much you can on each of your social networks to draw attention to your profile
- Don’t just use the tool, actively go on to the sites every once and awhile and interact with the people you have added as friends
- Give some good content on your profiles and update them at least once a month with more content
All in all a good campaign will start out with a lot of different social networks and then optimize itself as time goes on, based on the response (site hits, purchases, etc.) of each network. Just remember that no marketing is free. It will always take either work or money, or both. The idea behind indirect marketing is to do as little work as possible, target to a T, and not have to pay for someone to send visitors to your site.
