Indirect marketing is the less obvious way of promoting your brand or services. Unlike direct marketing which is a disruptive form of marketing and pushes you to buy a product or service, indirect marketing has a deeper impact on customers and intrigues them into learning more about your brand or product.
WhatsApp lately has emerged as a viable marketing platform as it gives businesses the option to tap its 175 million active users in 109 countries and across varied age groups. WhatsApp allows two-way communication which helps businesses in engaging in one-to-one conversations and build a strong personal bond with them.
Understanding Indirect Marketing
In the case of direct marketing, businesses promote their brand or product through e-mails, pop-up windows, clickable advertisements, or directly approaching customers and asking them to visit their website or app to buy the product.
Direct marketing can be considered as a ‘push’ approach as customers are pushed into engagement with the brand. Indirect marketing can be considered as a ‘pull’ approach where businesses engage with customers to share knowledge or talk about an event or cause and intrigue them rather than ask them explicitly to participate.
Why is indirect marketing necessary?
Indirect marketing is used to build a strong brand presence and increase personal engagement from customers and largely create brand awareness.
In times when every individual is drowning with thousands of ads and commercials on a daily basis, ignoring them has become a habit for many. In such cases, indirect marketing by sharing valuable information can help gain their genuine interest and bring organic traffic to your website. These organic visitors can quickly turn into customers.
For example, you run a juice brand. You can run an indirect marketing campaign where you can talk about the growing menace of plastic waste. An issue that most people are aware of. You can ask people to bring in empty plastic bottles of your juice brand and avail discount on next purchase or a shout out on social media as being a good samaritan.
This indirect marketing campaign can be seen as a move towards social cause and help gain awareness for your brand. Since it gives customers the feeling that they will be contributing to the eradication of plastic waste and earn discounts, it can gain huge popularity among people. As for your brand, you can get bottles for reuse and lower your production cost to accommodate the discounts and also reduce plastic waste to a large extent.
Does Indirect Marketing Negate The Role Of Direct Marketing?
Absolutely not! Direct and indirect marketing go hand in hand and direct marketing is equally important as indirect marketing. It drives sales and helps to create awareness about the brand, its product, and how customers can buy them. It helps in finding leads and nurturing them to convert them into customers. Direct marketing campaigns make tracking conversion rates and measure the impact of campaigns.
Direct marketing is purpose-driven and targets the utility aspect of the product. While indirect marketing is a more subtle way to connect with the emotional aspect of customers. Direct marketing helps in driving direct sales while indirect marketing helps in building a long-term personal connection with its audiences.
5 Reasons WhatsApp Is The Best Platform For Indirect Marketing
Here are five reasons that make WhatsApp one of the best platforms for indirect marketing:
1. Wide Audience
WhatsApp is used by people of all age groups, across several countries and multiple languages. This makes it an ideal platform for indirect marketing, as it allows you to reach out to a wide audience base and connect with them through a cause or event that everyone can relate to.
2. Higher Read Rate
WhatsApp messenger is used as a Personal messaging platform. It’s where people connect with their close ones and hence this platform has the highest read rate and message open rate. Using the platform for indirect marketing campaigns will have maximum impact and help in creating a wider range of brand awareness.
3. Easy to share multimedia
Unlike any other platform, WhatsApp doesn’t limit you to just a single mode of communication. You can make your messages more engaging and interactive by using various elements such as images, videos, links, and more. You can easily include CTAs and follow-up links for your audience to engage directly.
4. Show Your personality
Through WhatsApp, you get a chance to display your brand’s unique personality and engage with your customers personally. By reflecting your personality, you get to connect with your customers on a personal level and can help in retaining them for longer periods of time.
5. Community engagement
WhatsApp is a social platform where people form groups and communities based on common shared interests. By targeting communities that share a common cause, you can easily sell a vision for your brand. Through WhatsApp, you can invite groups and communities to join your initiative and build a positive brand image and create awareness.
3 Steller Examples Of Indirect Marketing Using WhatsApp
Here are some of the best examples of indirect marketing campaigns. These are brands that have managed to impact a large group of people in a short span of time.
1. Hellmann’s
HellManns’ which sells mayo products, has found the most unique way to use WhatsApp marketing to promote their brand. The campaign got the brand huge brand engagement. Through its latest campaign ‘WhatsCook’, it had asked its customers to simply send a picture of the ingredients they have in their refrigerator through WhatsApp, and HellManns’ suggested recipes that could be made from them. This campaign was a huge success and saw 13 thousand user registrations and 4 million website hits.
2. Absolut Vodka
Absolut Vodka created an exclusive party and had all tickets sold out except for two. It then announced that those who wish to join the party would have to come up with a convincing reason and send it to ‘Sven’- a virtual doorman via WhatsApp.
The campaign received a huge response and in just 3 days. Sven received over 600 contacts, generating more than 1000 multimedia content.
3. Banco Santander Bank
Banco Santander Bank created Open Bank, a WhatsApp customer service number where you can chat with the bank, post queries, solve issues. In a test pilot done with 17000 customers, 99% of consumers found the service very useful and 98% said they would continue to use it.
Concluding Words
Marketing and advertising have always been a crucial part of the brand-building strategy. In today’s time, you cant just create a product or website and expect your customers to find you. You need a way to draw attention to your products and services. WhatsApp helps you do just that in a more subtle manner using indirect marketing.
Are you ready to explore WhatsApp Marketing tips? Make sure you reach out to us to learn more about the SocialEpoch SCRM tool which can help you with running WhatsApp-based marketing campaigns and manage your customer base through WhatsApp SCRM.