Indirect Marketing: The Revenue You’re Not Measuring

Indirect marketing is any activity that builds preference, trust, or awareness without making a direct commercial ask. It works at a remove from the sale, shaping the conditions under which buying decisions get made rather than triggering them in the moment. Content, PR, thought leadership, word of mouth, community, partnerships and brand advertising all fall under this umbrella. The defining characteristic is that the commercial return is real but deferred, and often invisible to the measurement frameworks most teams rely on.

That invisibility is why indirect marketing gets systematically underfunded. Not because it doesn’t work, but because the people controlling budgets have built their careers on metrics that can be attributed cleanly to spend. When something can’t be tied to a last-click conversion, it tends to get cut. That is a category error, and it is costing companies more than they realise.

Why Indirect Marketing Gets Treated as a Second-Class Citizen

I spent the early part of my career deep in performance marketing. Running paid search and display at scale, managing hundreds of millions in ad spend, optimising towards cost-per-acquisition with real rigour. And I was good at it. But the longer I did it, the more I noticed something uncomfortable: a significant portion of what we were crediting to performance channels was simply capturing people who were already going to buy.

Someone searches for a brand by name. Performance gets the credit. Someone reads three blog posts over six weeks, sees a case study shared by a peer, hears the brand mentioned in a podcast, and then types the URL directly. Direct traffic gets the credit. The activity that actually moved the person, the indirect work that built the preference and reduced the friction, shows up nowhere in the attribution report.

This is not a new observation. But it remains one of the most consequential blind spots in how marketing budgets get allocated. When you optimise entirely for what you can measure, you systematically defund the things that make your measured channels work.

There is a useful way to think about this. Imagine a clothes shop. A customer who tries something on is far more likely to buy than one who browses the rail. The trying-on is the indirect work: it reduces uncertainty, builds confidence, creates an emotional connection with the product. The till transaction is the direct moment. If you only measured till transactions and cut everything that didn’t directly precede one, you would eventually gut the fitting rooms and wonder why conversion rates collapsed.

That is exactly what many performance-first organisations are doing with their marketing mix, and the consequences compound quietly over time.

What Indirect Marketing Actually Includes

The category is broader than most people map it. When practitioners talk about indirect marketing, they tend to default to content marketing. But content is one channel within a much wider set of approaches.

Content marketing, in its genuine form, means producing material that is worth consuming independent of its commercial purpose. Not content designed to rank for a keyword and funnel someone into a sales sequence, but content that actually helps people do something, understand something, or think about something differently. The commercial return comes from the association: if your content is consistently useful, your brand earns a kind of credibility that paid advertising cannot replicate.

Public relations sits here too. Earned media, analyst relations, journalist relationships, speaking opportunities. None of these directly sell anything. All of them shape the environment in which your brand is perceived. A company that appears regularly in credible trade press enters buying conversations with a different standing than one that doesn’t. That standing translates to shorter sales cycles, higher win rates, and lower churn, but none of that shows up in a campaign report.

Word of mouth is the most powerful indirect channel and the one marketers have the least control over. It is driven almost entirely by whether the product or service is genuinely good and whether the customer experience delivers on what the brand promised. I have worked with companies that were spending aggressively on acquisition while their NPS scores were deteriorating. The marketing team was fighting against the product, and losing. No indirect marketing programme fixes that. What it does is amplify what’s already true about a business, which is why it works best in companies that have actually earned it.

Creator and influencer partnerships occupy an interesting middle ground. Done well, they feel like word of mouth at scale. Done badly, they feel like advertising with a human face on it, and audiences have become sophisticated enough to tell the difference. The distinction is whether the creator genuinely uses and believes in the product, or whether the relationship is purely transactional. Creator-led campaigns that convert tend to be the ones where the creator’s audience trusts their judgment, and that trust is earned over time, not manufactured in a brief.

Community building, events, thought leadership, strategic partnerships, and even well-designed referral programmes all belong in this space. The common thread is that they build something, reputation, relationships, preference, trust, that makes subsequent commercial activity more efficient.

The Demand Creation Problem

One of the most important distinctions in marketing strategy is the difference between demand creation and demand capture. Performance marketing, at its core, is demand capture. It intercepts people who already have a need and routes them towards a purchase. It is efficient and measurable and genuinely valuable. But it has a ceiling.

If you are only capturing existing demand, your growth is bounded by the size of that demand. You can take share from competitors, you can improve conversion rates, you can reduce abandonment. But you cannot grow the market. You cannot reach people who don’t yet know they have a problem you can solve, or who have never considered your category. That is what indirect marketing does.

When I was growing an agency from 20 to over 100 people, the work that actually built the pipeline was not paid advertising. It was speaking at industry events, writing pieces that got picked up and shared, building relationships with journalists who covered the sector, and doing work that clients talked about. None of that had a clean attribution path. All of it was what made the agency worth choosing when a prospective client was ready to make a decision.

Growth strategy thinking has been grappling with this distinction for years. Forrester’s work on intelligent growth models points to the importance of building market presence over time, not just optimising for near-term conversion. The companies that grow consistently tend to be the ones investing in both dimensions simultaneously, not toggling between them based on quarterly pressure.

This connects directly to the broader questions of go-to-market strategy. If you want to understand how indirect marketing fits into a coherent commercial plan, the Go-To-Market and Growth Strategy hub covers the full strategic architecture, including how to sequence different marketing investments across the stages of market development.

How to Think About Measuring Indirect Marketing

The measurement problem with indirect marketing is real, but it is often used as an excuse to avoid the work rather than as a genuine analytical challenge. The fact that something is hard to measure precisely does not mean you cannot measure it at all. It means you need different measurement approaches, and you need to be honest about what you are approximating.

Brand tracking is the most direct tool. Regular surveys measuring aided and unaided awareness, consideration, preference, and net promoter scores give you a read on whether your indirect activity is building the asset you think it is. The movements are slow, which is why most companies do not invest in tracking them, but slow movements in brand metrics tend to precede fast movements in commercial ones.

Share of voice is another useful proxy. If you are consistently present in the conversations your category is having, in trade press, in search results for non-branded terms, in the content people share with each other, you are building a position that will eventually show up in market share. It is not a perfect measure, but it is a real one.

Cohort analysis can reveal the indirect effect in retrospect. If customers who engaged with your content before converting have higher lifetime value, lower churn, and shorter sales cycles than those who came through paid channels alone, that is evidence of the indirect programme working. You are not attributing it in real time, but you are building the case over time.

I judged the Effie Awards for a period, and one of the things that struck me about the strongest entries was how seriously the best marketers took the question of what they were actually measuring and why. The work that won was not the work with the cleanest attribution. It was the work with the most honest account of what it was trying to do and whether it had done it. That discipline, being clear about your theory of change before you start, is what separates rigorous indirect marketing from activity that just feels like marketing.

Tools that help you understand user behaviour and content engagement can give you useful signals about what is resonating before it shows up in conversion data. Platforms that track organic visibility and content performance give you a read on whether your indirect activity is building reach in the right places, even when the commercial impact is still months away.

Why the Best Indirect Marketing Doesn’t Feel Like Marketing

There is a version of indirect marketing that is just direct marketing with the ask removed. Thought leadership pieces that are thinly disguised sales pitches. Webinars that spend 45 minutes building to a product demo. Community programmes that exist to mine members for referrals. Audiences are not fooled by these, and the backlash when people feel manipulated is worse than never having run the programme at all.

The indirect marketing that actually builds something is genuinely useful. It helps people do their jobs better, understand their industry more clearly, make better decisions. The commercial benefit comes from the association, not from a hidden conversion mechanism baked into the content itself.

This requires a kind of generosity that is genuinely difficult to sustain inside organisations that are under short-term commercial pressure. When the CFO wants to know what the content programme is returning, “we are building the conditions for better commercial outcomes over the next 18 months” is a hard answer to give. But it is often the honest one, and the organisations that can hold that line tend to build more durable market positions than those that cannot.

I have worked with companies that genuinely delighted customers at every touchpoint. Not as a strategy, but as a standard. Those companies spent less on acquisition over time because their customers did a meaningful portion of their marketing for them. Word of mouth, referrals, unsolicited recommendations, organic advocacy. None of it showed up in a paid media report. All of it was worth more than what they would have spent to replicate it through paid channels.

The inverse is also true. I have seen companies with sophisticated indirect marketing programmes that were propping up products that did not deserve the advocacy being built around them. The marketing was good. The product was not. Eventually, the gap between what the marketing promised and what the product delivered caught up with them. Indirect marketing amplifies what is true about a business. It cannot manufacture what isn’t there.

Building an Indirect Marketing Programme That Compounds

The compounding nature of indirect marketing is its most important characteristic and the one that is hardest to communicate to stakeholders who think in quarterly cycles. A piece of content published today might drive meaningful traffic and influence in three years. A speaking programme might take 18 months to build the reputation that starts generating inbound. A PR relationship might take two years before it produces the piece that changes how a key segment perceives your brand.

This is not a reason to avoid these investments. It is a reason to start them earlier than feels necessary, and to protect them during the budget cycles when short-term pressure makes them look dispensable.

A coherent indirect marketing programme has a few non-negotiable components. First, a clear point of view. Not a brand purpose statement, but a genuine perspective on the industry, the customer’s problem, or the way the category works. Something you believe that is specific enough to be disagreed with. Generic thought leadership is not thought leadership. It is content marketing that has lost confidence in its own ideas.

Second, consistency over intensity. A company that publishes sporadically but with genuine quality, that shows up at events regularly, that maintains relationships with journalists and analysts over time, builds more than one that runs a six-month campaign and then goes dark. The cadence matters as much as the quality.

Third, distribution that matches where your audience actually spends time. It is easy to build an indirect marketing programme around the channels your team is comfortable with rather than the ones your audience uses. The most sophisticated content in the wrong place reaches nobody. BCG’s thinking on go-to-market strategy consistently emphasises channel fit as a precondition for programme success, and that applies as much to indirect marketing as it does to direct.

Fourth, patience that is structured rather than open-ended. “We’ll measure this in 18 months” is not a measurement strategy. Set specific milestones for leading indicators: share of voice, content engagement depth, brand search volume, referral rates, NPS movement. Not as proxies for commercial return, but as evidence that the programme is building what it is supposed to build.

The Relationship Between Indirect and Direct Marketing

The framing of indirect versus direct can become a false binary if you let it. The goal is not to choose between them. It is to understand how they interact and to fund both in proportions that reflect the actual commercial model.

Indirect marketing raises the floor. It means that when someone encounters your direct marketing, they already have some familiarity, some positive association, some reason to pay attention. That familiarity reduces the work the direct marketing has to do. Click-through rates are higher. Conversion rates are higher. Cost per acquisition falls. The paid channels become more efficient because the indirect work has done the pre-selling.

The relationship also works in reverse. Direct marketing, done well, can create the occasions that indirect marketing needs to build from. A product launch drives awareness that content can deepen. A promotional campaign creates customers who, if the experience is good enough, become advocates. Pricing and go-to-market strategy decisions shape who enters the customer base and therefore who might eventually become a source of indirect marketing value through referrals and word of mouth.

The companies that get this balance right tend to think about their marketing mix as a system rather than a collection of independent channels competing for budget. Each channel is doing a different job at a different point in the customer relationship, and the system works best when those jobs are clearly defined and properly resourced.

Growth hacking as a discipline is worth mentioning here, not because it is the same as indirect marketing, but because the better growth hacking frameworks recognise the importance of building retention and advocacy loops rather than just optimising acquisition funnels. The indirect marketing dimension of growth strategy is what turns a customer acquisition programme into a compounding asset rather than a treadmill.

If you are working through how to structure the relationship between indirect and direct investment in a broader commercial strategy, the thinking around go-to-market and growth strategy provides the framework for sequencing those decisions in a way that reflects your market position and growth stage.

About the Author

Keith Lacy is a marketing strategist and former agency CEO with 20+ years of experience across agency leadership, performance marketing, and commercial strategy. He writes The Marketing Juice to cut through the noise and share what works.

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