Indirect Marketing Is Doing More Work Than You Think

Indirect marketing is any activity that builds awareness, trust, or preference without making a direct sales pitch. Instead of asking someone to buy, it creates the conditions under which buying becomes more likely. Content, PR, sponsorship, word of mouth, creator partnerships, and community all fall under this umbrella. They work in the background, shaping how people think about a brand long before a purchase decision is made.

Most marketing teams undervalue it because it is harder to attribute. That undervaluation is a strategic mistake, and one I have watched companies make repeatedly over the past two decades.

Why Indirect Marketing Gets Dismissed

Early in my career, I was obsessed with lower-funnel performance. Click-through rates, cost per acquisition, return on ad spend. The numbers were clean, the feedback loop was fast, and the CFO could follow the logic. I thought indirect marketing was what you did when you had budget left over, or when the brand team needed something to show at the annual conference.

I was wrong, and it took running an agency and watching client after client hit a growth ceiling to understand why.

The problem with performance marketing is not that it does not work. It is that it works on a specific and limited population: people who already know they want something and are already considering your category. When you optimise relentlessly for that group, you get very good at capturing existing demand. You do not get good at creating new demand. And at some point, you have captured most of what is there.

Indirect marketing is what fills that pool back up. It is what makes someone think of your brand six months before they are ready to buy. It is what makes a referral feel natural rather than forced. It is what makes a journalist include your company in a roundup without being asked. None of that shows up cleanly in a last-click attribution report, which is exactly why it gets cut when budgets tighten.

If you are thinking about how indirect marketing fits into a broader go-to-market approach, the Go-To-Market and Growth Strategy hub covers the fuller picture of how these pieces connect.

What Actually Counts as Indirect Marketing

The category is broader than most people realise. It includes anything that creates awareness, builds credibility, or generates preference without a direct call to action. Some of the most common forms:

• Content marketing: Articles, videos, podcasts, tools. Useful content that attracts an audience and builds authority over time.
• Public relations: Earned media coverage, analyst relationships, award entries. Third-party validation that money cannot directly buy.
• Word of mouth and referral: The oldest form of marketing. Still the most trusted. Referral programs can formalise it, but the underlying driver is product and service quality.
• Sponsorship and events: Association with things your audience cares about. Brand presence in contexts where there is no sales pressure.
• Creator and influencer partnerships: Particularly effective when the creator has genuine credibility in a category, not just a large following.
• Community building: Forums, user groups, brand communities. The most durable form of indirect marketing because the audience does the work.
• SEO: Organic search is indirect in the sense that the content earns its position rather than paying for it, and the relationship with the reader begins before any commercial intent is established.

What these have in common is that they are not asking for anything in the moment. They are building something: awareness, trust, familiarity, preference. The conversion happens later, often in a different channel entirely, which is where the attribution problem starts.

The Attribution Problem Is Real, But It Is Not a Reason to Stop

I have sat in enough budget review meetings to know how this conversation goes. The CMO wants to defend the PR spend or the content programme. The CFO asks what it is generating. Someone pulls up a report showing zero conversions attributed to those channels. The budget gets cut.

The report is not lying. It is just measuring the wrong thing, in the wrong way, at the wrong time.

Attribution models are built around trackable events. A click, a form fill, a purchase. Indirect marketing rarely produces those events directly. What it produces is a mental state: someone who has heard of you, trusts you, and is more likely to respond when they eventually see a direct response ad or a sales email. That mental state is invisible to most measurement systems.

When I was managing significant ad spend across multiple sectors, one of the most consistent patterns I saw was this: brands that had invested in content and PR over the previous two or three years consistently had lower cost-per-acquisition in their paid channels than brands that had not. The paid team would take credit. But the real story was that the indirect work had already done half the selling before the paid ad ever appeared.

This is not an argument for ignoring measurement. It is an argument for being honest about what your measurement system can and cannot see. Tools like Hotjar can show you what happens on-site, but they cannot tell you why someone trusted your brand enough to visit in the first place. That trust was built somewhere else, probably through indirect channels.

The honest approximation is more useful than the false precision. If your branded search volume is growing, if your referral traffic is increasing, if your word-of-mouth scores are improving, something is working in the background. You do not need a perfect attribution model to act on those signals.

Word of Mouth Is Not a Tactic. It Is a Verdict.

There is a version of indirect marketing that no budget can manufacture: genuine word of mouth driven by a product or service that people actually want to talk about. It is the most powerful form of marketing that exists, and it is the one most companies spend the least time thinking about.

I have worked with companies that spent aggressively on every channel imaginable and still struggled to grow, because the underlying product experience was mediocre. Customers were not delighted. They were not disappointed enough to complain, but they were not impressed enough to tell anyone. The marketing was doing the heavy lifting that the product should have been doing.

This is one of the more uncomfortable truths in marketing: a company that genuinely delighted its customers at every touchpoint, consistently and at scale, would need far less marketing than most. The marketing would become amplification, not compensation. Word of mouth would do most of the acquisition work. Retention would be high. The economics would be fundamentally better.

Most companies are not in that position. Marketing becomes a blunt instrument to prop up a customer experience that is not remarkable enough to sell itself. That is not a reason to stop marketing. But it is worth being clear-eyed about what you are actually doing and why.

Referral programmes can formalise word of mouth, and when the product is strong enough, they work extremely well. The mechanics of a good referral programme, giving people a reason and a mechanism to share, are well-documented. But the programme will only amplify what is already there. If customers are not naturally inclined to recommend you, a referral incentive will produce shallow, low-quality referrals that do not convert or retain.

Creator Partnerships: Where Indirect Marketing Gets Interesting

One of the more significant shifts in indirect marketing over the past decade has been the rise of creator partnerships as a genuine brand-building channel. Not influencer marketing in the spray-and-pray sense, where you pay someone with a large following to hold your product and smile. Genuine partnerships with creators who have built real credibility in a specific category.

The distinction matters. A creator with 80,000 highly engaged followers in a specific niche will almost always outperform a celebrity with 2 million passive followers for a brand trying to reach that niche. The audience trusts the creator’s judgment. The endorsement carries weight because the creator’s reputation is on the line.

What makes creator partnerships sit firmly in the indirect category is that the best ones do not feel like advertising. The creator integrates the brand into content that their audience would have watched or read anyway. The commercial relationship is disclosed, but the value of the content stands independently. That is fundamentally different from a paid ad, even if the creator is being compensated.

For brands thinking about how to use creators in a go-to-market context, Later’s work on creator-led go-to-market campaigns offers some useful frameworks for thinking about how creator content and conversion can work together without the creator content becoming just another ad format.

Content as a Long-Term Asset, Not a Short-Term Tactic

Content marketing is probably the most misunderstood form of indirect marketing. Companies start a blog, publish twelve posts, see no immediate results, and conclude that content does not work. What they have actually concluded is that they did not give it enough time or consistency.

Content compounds. A well-written, genuinely useful article that earns organic search traffic will keep delivering for years. A podcast that builds a loyal audience creates a relationship that no paid ad can replicate. A tool or calculator that solves a real problem will generate links, shares, and awareness without any ongoing spend. These are assets, not expenses, but they only become assets if you invest in them long enough to see the compounding effect.

The challenge is that content requires patience that most marketing teams are not structured to exercise. Quarterly targets and short reporting cycles push teams toward tactics with faster feedback loops. Content sits awkwardly in that environment. The payoff is real, but it arrives on a different timescale than the one most organisations are optimising for.

When I was growing an agency, we invested heavily in our own content and thought leadership before it was fashionable to do so. It did not produce leads in month one or month three. By month eighteen, we were getting inbound enquiries from companies that had been reading our work for over a year. The cost per lead from that channel was a fraction of anything we were doing in paid. The quality of the conversations was better because the prospect had already self-selected based on what we stood for.

That experience shaped how I think about content as a business asset. It is not a marketing activity. It is a sales infrastructure that operates while you sleep.

PR and Earned Media: The Credibility Channel

Public relations sits in a strange place in most marketing budgets. It is expensive in terms of agency fees or in-house resource, the results are unpredictable, and the value is genuinely difficult to quantify. And yet the brands with the strongest reputations almost always have strong PR programmes running underneath.

The value of earned media is not the traffic it drives, though that can be significant. The value is the third-party credibility it confers. A customer reading a feature about your company in a respected trade publication is receiving a signal that no paid ad can replicate: someone independent of your marketing budget decided your company was worth writing about. That carries weight.

I have judged the Effie Awards, which are specifically focused on marketing effectiveness rather than creative execution. What you see consistently among the winning campaigns is that the most effective work almost always has an earned media dimension. The paid activity amplifies something that already has genuine traction. The campaigns that rely entirely on paid reach, with no earned component, tend to be efficient but not significant in terms of brand position.

For companies operating in complex or regulated industries, PR becomes even more important. Forrester’s analysis of go-to-market challenges in sectors like medical devices highlights how trust and credibility, which are built through indirect channels, are often the primary barriers to growth, not awareness or reach.

Sponsorship: Borrowed Relevance or Genuine Connection

Sponsorship is one of the more misused forms of indirect marketing. Done well, it creates genuine association between a brand and something an audience cares about. Done badly, it is a logo on a banner that nobody notices and a cheque that produces no measurable outcome.

The difference between the two usually comes down to integration. A brand that sponsors an event and then shows up with a stand, some merchandise, and a logo placement has bought presence. A brand that sponsors an event and creates something genuinely useful or interesting within that context, content, experiences, tools, has bought association. The first is forgettable. The second can be memorable.

The question to ask before any sponsorship commitment is not “will our logo be seen?” but “will people who see this association think better of us?” If the answer is unclear, the sponsorship probably needs more thought before the contract is signed.

Integrating Indirect and Direct: The Full-Funnel Reality

The framing of indirect versus direct marketing can be misleading if it implies these are competing approaches. They are not. They operate at different stages of the customer relationship and they work best when they are designed to complement each other.

The practical model is straightforward: indirect marketing creates awareness and builds preference across a broad audience, most of whom are not ready to buy. Direct marketing captures the intent of the subset who are ready. The size and quality of the direct marketing pool is directly influenced by the quality and consistency of the indirect marketing that preceded it.

This is why brands that cut indirect marketing to fund direct response often see short-term efficiency gains followed by medium-term growth problems. The direct response channels look more efficient because the denominator (total spend) has fallen. But the numerator (total customers acquired) eventually starts to fall too, because the pool of warm prospects is no longer being replenished.

BCG’s research on go-to-market strategy has consistently highlighted that the most effective growth strategies align brand-building with commercial execution, rather than treating them as separate workstreams with competing budgets. That alignment is the practical expression of integrating indirect and direct marketing into a coherent system.

The companies I have seen grow most sustainably over a five-year horizon are the ones that maintained investment in indirect channels even when the short-term pressure was to cut them. Not because they were being strategically principled, but because the people running those businesses understood intuitively that the pipeline of future customers had to be built before it was needed.

There is a broader set of frameworks for thinking about how indirect marketing fits into a complete growth system. The Go-To-Market and Growth Strategy section of The Marketing Juice covers channel strategy, audience development, and how to sequence investment across the funnel as a company scales.

How to Make the Case Internally

If you are trying to defend or expand indirect marketing investment inside an organisation that is sceptical, the argument needs to be framed in business terms, not marketing terms. “Brand building is important” will lose to “our CAC has increased 40% in the last two years and here is why.” The second framing opens a conversation. The first closes one.

The metrics that tend to land with commercially-minded stakeholders are branded search volume growth, share of voice in earned media, net promoter score trends, and the ratio of inbound to outbound pipeline. None of these are perfect proxies for the value of indirect marketing, but they are defensible and they tell a story that connects to business outcomes rather than marketing activity.

It also helps to be specific about the mechanism. Not “PR builds brand awareness” but “when a prospect sees us mentioned in three different industry publications before they get on a sales call, our close rate is higher and the sales cycle is shorter.” If you can build that kind of evidence from your own data, even anecdotally, the conversation changes.

The broader challenge is that most organisations are structured to reward short-term measurable outcomes. Indirect marketing requires a different kind of institutional patience, and that patience usually has to be modelled from the top. If the CMO does not believe in it, the budget will not survive the first difficult quarter.

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.

Frequently Asked Questions