Comparing online and offline marketing

Marketing has always been a vital function in any business that is keen on growth. Recently two forms of marketing have come under growing analysis and comparison – there is the traditional form of marketing that involves tried and tested media such as radio, television and print, and there is online marketing which utilizes the internet tools such as websites, emails, blogs and banner ads. As a business owner or manager, you would always want to utilize the method that would best serve your interests and that can generate the highest return per unit cost.

Online marketing methods might be considered cheaper than traditional (or offline) marketing methods. However, this does depend on the type of offline marketing you use. It is cheaper to use online methods such as setting up a blog (cost can be as low as $0), posting on other people’s blogs and joining forums that allow you to directly market your business.

However, when you go a step further and start to pay search engines for PPC (pay per click) advertising, pay website designers and incur annual domain registration costs, online marketing can become more expensive than some forms of offline marketing. Some of the low cost offline marketing methods include leaflets and word of mouth or door-to-door campaigns. Of course, the cost of offline marketing methods such as radio, television and newspapers especially when targeting urban populations in the large developed cities is very expensive.

As far as advertising space is concerned, online marketing is much more flexible than offline marketing. In theory, there is really no limit to the amount of space an advertisement can occupy on a web page. This also means costs are not as high relative to ad space when compared to radio and TV ads where the limited space and time slots available for advertisement can make overall costs prohibitive.

Another key strong point of online marketing is its reach – the internet by far dwarfs the reach of any other advertising media. Since the World Wide Web knows no geographic or national boundaries, online marketing is particularly attractive for businesses that target an international audience. But the internet’s wide reach is also the source of one of its key shortcomings when compared to offline marketing – targeted marketing.

With offline marketing, targeted advertising is much easier to achieve. If you want to reach an audience in a particular town, then all you need to do is place an ad in a widely read but local daily. Even though the internet does allow for targeted marketing, it requires some level of sophistication and is not as straightforward as offline marketing methods.

Online marketing techniques are also not effective when targeting certain demographics. For instance, while the younger generations is largely web savvy, the older generation is not as appreciative on the power of technology in driving business and delivering products. So if you have a product that is meant for an older population, offline marketing techniques will usually be the better alternative.

Tags: blog optimization, budget fixing for online business, earn money online, how to earn money online

on Sunday, February 6th, 2011 at 10:10 am RSS feeds, Traffic maximization, marketing strategy.

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