Reading a discussion thread in a forum the other day, I saw an interesting conversation about different marketing ideas. I noticed that people are polarized into two different approaches to marketing.

Either they hate one approach and love another, or they don’t realize an entirely different approach is possible.

Examining marketing activities from the actions you take to pursue clients or customers, there are two main types of marketing, namely passive and active marketing.

What are they? And what are the differences?

The difference between active and passive marketing

Active marketing is all marketing activities that involve pursuing the customers by taking proper actions to move yourself closer to the customers. After a networking event, you may get a list of contacts who are interested in your product or service. You may attempt to follow up with these prospects by calling them.

Another example is cold calling to a company to find out if they are looking for what you have to offer.

On the other hand, when you are waiting for prospective customers to response to some kind of information you have posted or distributed, then it is considered as passive form of marketing.

You may have written and syndicate a bunch of articles about a topic and begin establishing yourself as an expert in the field. This is when you begin to receive queries about consulting work you do or products that you sell.

Passive marketing is very powerful as people will come to you feeling that they already know you. They are clear about what your products or services are. Perhaps they are calling just to find more information or even ready to hire you.

Product-driven business is no different. The concept of passive and active marketing apply for product sales as well.

Getting your message out — best practices

While it is possible to generate business with either one of the form of marketing, you will more likely get better results if you combine best of both worlds. In fact, sometimes the activities overlap each other and are hard to distinguish which is which.

Passive marketing is great for building your expert status. If you are small businesses selling products, you can establish brand awareness regarding your company or products. By providing educational materials about your product or service, people who are interested in it will know better about their problem and how you can help them solve it.

Another example is blogging. By writing great content regularly, people will see you as an expert in the industry without you actually going in front of them.

For most people, they will not buy the first time they find a solution to their problem. They want to think about it. They are distracted with other things. Or they simply want to research more and find alternative solutions.

This is when active marketing comes into play. By actively follow up the prospects with more information, you have just increased the chance of closing the sale. Following up with prospects can be done by sending white papers, articles, or calling to setup an appointment.

If you are following up with articles, you are doing both passive and active marketing at the same time, although this approach involves no hard selling and is very low key.

Back to our example above about networking event, instead of calling them, you can promise them special report or article of some sorts about the issue they are interested in. Not only does they will more likely give their contact information, the result is often astonishing. You warm them up before calling so they know about your product or service the time you get in touch.

This approach also establish yourself as an expert who knows your territory.

Why combinations work best

Why can’t you just focus on one approach or another? Because it doesn’t work that way.

Some people will not respond no matter how useful or appropriate the message you distribute is to them. They prefer to sit there and procrastinate or leave it for later date.

Contrarily, if you take only the active approach, your business will be slow to crawl when you stop doing any type of this marketing. Without reputation that is built using passive marketing, getting business is even harder.

The applications

How can you combine passive and active marketing online? What are different applications that you can use to leverage them?

It is easy to use existing marketing technology to automate passive marketing. When you realize the big picture, you should plan the strategy with active marketing in mind.

For example, sending email newsletter allows you to keep in touch with prospects, demonstrate your expertise, and move them closer to sales. If you offer any kind of coaching or consulting, you can get them to register through a form if they are interested and then you follow up through active marketing.

You can do one to many teleseminar. Offer one hour group coaching, announce that via your email list or podcast or blog.

Marketing can be fun if you know how to leverage what you know to your own advantage. All of a sudden, it becomes more of giving and contributing rather than demanding.