The Top 10 Reasons Why Online Marketing Dominates Traditional Advertising
Assassin Marketing asked:
Online marketing has become the most successful method of advertising for any kind of business on the planet during the last decade. It is lightning fast and can promote your business to thousands of potential customers daily. As marketing is a primary factor for a long and successful business, the internet facilitates this process in a way that will ensure the maximum exposure to what you are offering.
Traditional marketing is becoming more expensive and slower to produce results. It also requires much more time and effort. It often has to be done by many employees and is restricted by many barriers and regulations which make it hard to get the most beneficial results. Then along comes the internet as it makes the entire globe seem like a short alley rather than a large city where you can reach customers overseas in a matter of seconds. Online marketing is superior to traditional ways of marketing in almost every aspect, and here we list the top 10 reasons online marketing dominates traditional advertising.
1. SPEED
Email marketing campaigns are fast, targeted, cost-effective, highly efficient method of marketing your business. They reach a lot of customers in the shortest time. Traditional mail marketing can take months and a lot of money and effort to generate results.
2. GEOGRAPHICAL RESTRICTIONS
The whole globe can be your customer base when you are marketing your business online, as the internet reaches almost every house on the planet. On the other hand, you are often restricted to local customers from a smaller geographical area when you market offline.
3. MARKETING EFFECTS
Online marketing is based on pull marketing effects, which means that online customers come across your website when they are looking for similar products of yours. While offline marketing is based on push marketing effects, which means you have to introduce your business to every single customer that come into your location.
4. SALES PROCESS
When your business is marketing online, you can make a sale in a matter of seconds; where the customer chooses what product or services they wise to buy, they move to the check out page, pays for the product or services on a secure page, and then receives their purchase. Offline advertising is very different as the selling process is very complex and requires a lot of effort and persuasion and sometimes can’t be completed after all.
5. HOURS OF OPERATION
Your website is self-managed and requires you only to make few changes, and after that it can operate non-stop and can be selling products or services while you are sleeping. Offline stores are restricted to the human active times, this means you open in the morning and close in the evening and you can’t make a sale while you are closed. In other words, the offline selling process has a shorter sales life than the online one.
6. COST OF MEDIA
If you want to make a commercial on TV or radio or a newspaper, you will pay a fortune. While online marketing allows you to make a short video or audio commercial and submit it thousands of media communities and it will cost you next to nothing.
7. LIMITED ADVERTISING LIFE SPAN
When you post an ad online about your business or website, with an article for example, it can be online forever and the place where the ad occupies will be untouched for a long time. On the other hand, offline ads can be only active for an agreed-upon period of time and then it will be replaced.
8. COST PER CUSTOMER
These costs are reasonably low with online marketing but relatively high with offline forms of advertising. They are simply the costs incurred to generate potential customers for the business.
9. CUSTOMER SUPPORT
With one email you can solve all your customer problems and concerns. This process is much more time consuming and require more effort offline.
10. ONGOING MARKETING INFORMATION
It is very easy and only takes a few seconds to collect all the information and data about every aspect of your business when you market online. Offline information and data are stored within piles of documents, where it requires a squad of employees to collect the required information.
As you can clearly see, online marketing is far superior to traditional forms of marketing. Online marketing is all about saving you money, time, and effort; yet brings you the required results you seek and most of the time exceeds your expectations.
Online marketing has become the most successful method of advertising for any kind of business on the planet during the last decade. It is lightning fast and can promote your business to thousands of potential customers daily. As marketing is a primary factor for a long and successful business, the internet facilitates this process in a way that will ensure the maximum exposure to what you are offering.
Traditional marketing is becoming more expensive and slower to produce results. It also requires much more time and effort. It often has to be done by many employees and is restricted by many barriers and regulations which make it hard to get the most beneficial results. Then along comes the internet as it makes the entire globe seem like a short alley rather than a large city where you can reach customers overseas in a matter of seconds. Online marketing is superior to traditional ways of marketing in almost every aspect, and here we list the top 10 reasons online marketing dominates traditional advertising.
1. SPEED
Email marketing campaigns are fast, targeted, cost-effective, highly efficient method of marketing your business. They reach a lot of customers in the shortest time. Traditional mail marketing can take months and a lot of money and effort to generate results.
2. GEOGRAPHICAL RESTRICTIONS
The whole globe can be your customer base when you are marketing your business online, as the internet reaches almost every house on the planet. On the other hand, you are often restricted to local customers from a smaller geographical area when you market offline.
3. MARKETING EFFECTS
Online marketing is based on pull marketing effects, which means that online customers come across your website when they are looking for similar products of yours. While offline marketing is based on push marketing effects, which means you have to introduce your business to every single customer that come into your location.
4. SALES PROCESS
When your business is marketing online, you can make a sale in a matter of seconds; where the customer chooses what product or services they wise to buy, they move to the check out page, pays for the product or services on a secure page, and then receives their purchase. Offline advertising is very different as the selling process is very complex and requires a lot of effort and persuasion and sometimes can’t be completed after all.
5. HOURS OF OPERATION
Your website is self-managed and requires you only to make few changes, and after that it can operate non-stop and can be selling products or services while you are sleeping. Offline stores are restricted to the human active times, this means you open in the morning and close in the evening and you can’t make a sale while you are closed. In other words, the offline selling process has a shorter sales life than the online one.
6. COST OF MEDIA
If you want to make a commercial on TV or radio or a newspaper, you will pay a fortune. While online marketing allows you to make a short video or audio commercial and submit it thousands of media communities and it will cost you next to nothing.
7. LIMITED ADVERTISING LIFE SPAN
When you post an ad online about your business or website, with an article for example, it can be online forever and the place where the ad occupies will be untouched for a long time. On the other hand, offline ads can be only active for an agreed-upon period of time and then it will be replaced.
8. COST PER CUSTOMER
These costs are reasonably low with online marketing but relatively high with offline forms of advertising. They are simply the costs incurred to generate potential customers for the business.
9. CUSTOMER SUPPORT
With one email you can solve all your customer problems and concerns. This process is much more time consuming and require more effort offline.
10. ONGOING MARKETING INFORMATION
It is very easy and only takes a few seconds to collect all the information and data about every aspect of your business when you market online. Offline information and data are stored within piles of documents, where it requires a squad of employees to collect the required information.
As you can clearly see, online marketing is far superior to traditional forms of marketing. Online marketing is all about saving you money, time, and effort; yet brings you the required results you seek and most of the time exceeds your expectations.
Insider Secrets to Internet Marketing
Gerri D Smith asked:
“The trick to developing a product that is guaranteed to sell like crazy is to offer a solution to a problem. If you can save people time, money, or hassle, they’ll be willing to pay for your solution!” – Corey Rudl
If someone offered to help you make a million dollars, why would you say, “no?” This very thing goes on all the time to thousands of people all over the world. You may have never imagined you could make a six-seven figure income, yet it’s happening all the time on the internet. This is the result of internet marketing. It is a viable business and has made many millionaires. Even 19-year-old billionaires!
On the internet, millions upon millions of transactions take place every day, every hour, every minute and every second. This was not possible fifteen to twenty years ago. Now, with access to the internet, you have the capability of reaching many thousands of potential customers at the touch of a button. And – you are only limited by your imagination.
Internet marketing sounds easy to do, yet most businesses that currently use the internet to market their business lose money. When marketing your business online, there are three important steps that will make you feel confident. They include:
1. Targeting your audience.
2. Automating your business, and
3. Testing and adjusting your offer.
Your target audience depends upon the type of service or product you are offering. A little homework is required here. If you wish to sell hair and beauty products, you wouldn’t send your announcements to farmers. Find out where your customers are by searching the web. Track what they are interested in when they visit other websites. Find out by asking. Do market surveys. Send out questionnaires. Query friends, acquaintances, neighbors and find out what interests them.
You can easily find out what your customers want by testing your products and services. Then if it doesn’t sell, you can make adjustments before spending lots of money on a product or service that the market won’t support. Testing new products, ideas, or your advertising message on a small target audience first, saves you time, effort, and money. Doing a small test, first, also allows you time to make adjustments to your website or your advertisement to meet the needs of your customer.
Automate your online business so that your valuable time and attention is directed to creating more products or services. There are now hundreds of web sources that offer business automation services. They can send out your advertisements, business cards, flyers, press releases, and post cards to thousands of potential buyers at a time. They can notify your customers when their order is ready to ship. They can do your bookkeeping and track of your customer’s order.
Internet marketing can be as easy as you make it, and it can be fun. Thinking up products and services that meet the needs of customers and getting them to the customer in a manner that is convenient and appropriate is rewarding in itself. And when your product or service is something you love creating, and when it helps others save time, money, feel and look good, this is a great benefit.
Three other benefits of selling your product or service online are:
1. You have access to a global market at the touch of a finger.
2. Your investment of time is small.
3. You can start an online business with little cost.
Compared to the cost of offline marketing – newspaper, radio, and TV ads, and the cost of postage with direct mailing, you can set up a website at a low cost and start offering your product or service and even see the results in a matter of days. With internet marketing you can test your ads, sales offers, website design, and notify thousands of potential customers – and sometimes receive an order within hours – and almost at no cost.
The internet allows you to reach a global market and the cost is much less than using the traditional methods. You can quickly change your marketing plan and send out your marketing message multiple times. Whereas, with the old way of selecting the media and waiting for your ad to be scheduled, printed, and then distributed, the comparison in cost and in time is monumental.
For internet marketing to work for you, you must set your business to run on automatic so you can put your attention on developing more products and better services. You must target your advertising message, consistently get it out to as many potential buyers as possible, and be ready to test, test, and test again to make certain your offer is what your customers wish to buy. These key secrets are a small part of what makes for a successful online business. It’s up to you to find your passion, your faith, and your will to increase your sales, and – to give back.
“The trick to developing a product that is guaranteed to sell like crazy is to offer a solution to a problem. If you can save people time, money, or hassle, they’ll be willing to pay for your solution!” – Corey Rudl
If someone offered to help you make a million dollars, why would you say, “no?” This very thing goes on all the time to thousands of people all over the world. You may have never imagined you could make a six-seven figure income, yet it’s happening all the time on the internet. This is the result of internet marketing. It is a viable business and has made many millionaires. Even 19-year-old billionaires!
On the internet, millions upon millions of transactions take place every day, every hour, every minute and every second. This was not possible fifteen to twenty years ago. Now, with access to the internet, you have the capability of reaching many thousands of potential customers at the touch of a button. And – you are only limited by your imagination.
Internet marketing sounds easy to do, yet most businesses that currently use the internet to market their business lose money. When marketing your business online, there are three important steps that will make you feel confident. They include:
1. Targeting your audience.
2. Automating your business, and
3. Testing and adjusting your offer.
Your target audience depends upon the type of service or product you are offering. A little homework is required here. If you wish to sell hair and beauty products, you wouldn’t send your announcements to farmers. Find out where your customers are by searching the web. Track what they are interested in when they visit other websites. Find out by asking. Do market surveys. Send out questionnaires. Query friends, acquaintances, neighbors and find out what interests them.
You can easily find out what your customers want by testing your products and services. Then if it doesn’t sell, you can make adjustments before spending lots of money on a product or service that the market won’t support. Testing new products, ideas, or your advertising message on a small target audience first, saves you time, effort, and money. Doing a small test, first, also allows you time to make adjustments to your website or your advertisement to meet the needs of your customer.
Automate your online business so that your valuable time and attention is directed to creating more products or services. There are now hundreds of web sources that offer business automation services. They can send out your advertisements, business cards, flyers, press releases, and post cards to thousands of potential buyers at a time. They can notify your customers when their order is ready to ship. They can do your bookkeeping and track of your customer’s order.
Internet marketing can be as easy as you make it, and it can be fun. Thinking up products and services that meet the needs of customers and getting them to the customer in a manner that is convenient and appropriate is rewarding in itself. And when your product or service is something you love creating, and when it helps others save time, money, feel and look good, this is a great benefit.
Three other benefits of selling your product or service online are:
1. You have access to a global market at the touch of a finger.
2. Your investment of time is small.
3. You can start an online business with little cost.
Compared to the cost of offline marketing – newspaper, radio, and TV ads, and the cost of postage with direct mailing, you can set up a website at a low cost and start offering your product or service and even see the results in a matter of days. With internet marketing you can test your ads, sales offers, website design, and notify thousands of potential customers – and sometimes receive an order within hours – and almost at no cost.
The internet allows you to reach a global market and the cost is much less than using the traditional methods. You can quickly change your marketing plan and send out your marketing message multiple times. Whereas, with the old way of selecting the media and waiting for your ad to be scheduled, printed, and then distributed, the comparison in cost and in time is monumental.
For internet marketing to work for you, you must set your business to run on automatic so you can put your attention on developing more products and better services. You must target your advertising message, consistently get it out to as many potential buyers as possible, and be ready to test, test, and test again to make certain your offer is what your customers wish to buy. These key secrets are a small part of what makes for a successful online business. It’s up to you to find your passion, your faith, and your will to increase your sales, and – to give back.
Merging Your Online and Offline Marketing
Kaye Z. Marks asked:
There’s no reason for you to consider your offline and online marketing completely separate entities.
There are those companies out there who think that to achieve success online you need to use a completely online approach to your marketing and anything else will be counter productive. You’ll also find those who avoid the internet like the plague and think you don’t need to have any part of their business online at any time.
To avoid one or the other is to lose a good potential for additional business. Both approaches target different people, and you are able to gain support from both types of people if you know how to best combine these two forms of separate marketing.
Who says you can’t have ads online that direct people to your physical location? I’ve seen plenty of ads online that are for completely offline businesses. Now, you can still often find a website for them that gives people additional information about the business, but still directs them to the actual store.
This is easily accomplished, especially since it is rather cheap to set up a website that can provide people with extra details about your company.
Offline companies taking advantage of online approaches happens far more often than the online companies doing the same. Instead they try to avoid printing anything for their advertising if they can help it, but the offline forms of marketing are often going to work well with the same people who spend a lot of their shopping time on the web.
Try some greeting card printing that you can use to send people your web address along with a request to give you a chance. The great thing about this is that because an online business is so easy to gain access to, you’ll have a much better chance of gaining a person’s attention, and getting them to immediately log onto your website.
Because of that ability to immediately try out your website, your greeting card printing will be particularly successful, even more so than if you had a normal offline business that people needed to drive to in order to check out.
And this is just one way of taking advantage of offline marketing to boost up your business. Brochures can be just as effective for an online company as they would be for an offline one. If you avoid anything but internet advertising you’re losing access to some very long standing and great styles of marketing.
No company should ever block themselves off from effective styles of marketing no matter what kind of business they use. Take a look at the entire marketing field and decide on what will work best for your company.
You don’t want to fail to capitalize on a great style of marketing simply because you didn’t think it would work with your company.
There’s no reason for you to consider your offline and online marketing completely separate entities.
There are those companies out there who think that to achieve success online you need to use a completely online approach to your marketing and anything else will be counter productive. You’ll also find those who avoid the internet like the plague and think you don’t need to have any part of their business online at any time.
To avoid one or the other is to lose a good potential for additional business. Both approaches target different people, and you are able to gain support from both types of people if you know how to best combine these two forms of separate marketing.
Who says you can’t have ads online that direct people to your physical location? I’ve seen plenty of ads online that are for completely offline businesses. Now, you can still often find a website for them that gives people additional information about the business, but still directs them to the actual store.
This is easily accomplished, especially since it is rather cheap to set up a website that can provide people with extra details about your company.
Offline companies taking advantage of online approaches happens far more often than the online companies doing the same. Instead they try to avoid printing anything for their advertising if they can help it, but the offline forms of marketing are often going to work well with the same people who spend a lot of their shopping time on the web.
Try some greeting card printing that you can use to send people your web address along with a request to give you a chance. The great thing about this is that because an online business is so easy to gain access to, you’ll have a much better chance of gaining a person’s attention, and getting them to immediately log onto your website.
Because of that ability to immediately try out your website, your greeting card printing will be particularly successful, even more so than if you had a normal offline business that people needed to drive to in order to check out.
And this is just one way of taking advantage of offline marketing to boost up your business. Brochures can be just as effective for an online company as they would be for an offline one. If you avoid anything but internet advertising you’re losing access to some very long standing and great styles of marketing.
No company should ever block themselves off from effective styles of marketing no matter what kind of business they use. Take a look at the entire marketing field and decide on what will work best for your company.
You don’t want to fail to capitalize on a great style of marketing simply because you didn’t think it would work with your company.
5 Simple Steps to Adding Offline Marketing to your Online Business
Alicia Forest asked:
Taking my struggling consulting business online and following the business model I now do turned everything around for me, financially and otherwise. So when I started hearing from my mentors that I might want to add some offline marketing tactics back into the mix, I was hesitant to say the least.
But then I started studying and learning more about some specific direct mail strategies, and recognizing the power they have, I started wondering in maybe I wasn’t missing an important piece of the puzzle to take my business up another notch.
Then I started seeing some amazing results from my colleagues who were using direct mail in addition to their online marketing efforts – things as simple as a postcard – and I decided I needed to get into this game myself. (I’ll keep you posted on my own results in a future article.)
How do you get started adding direct mail marketing to your mix? Here are 5 simple steps:
1. Start collecting physical addresses
You may have the addresses of those clients and customers who have purchased from you already, which is a great start. But you also want to start collecting snail mail addresses from those people who sign up for your list. This way, when you’re ready to send a physical mailing out, you’ll have all the information you need. AND, as email deliverability gets muddier, you’ll always have this other option of reaching your audience.
2. Plan a campaign
I always tell my clients to plan an online promotion campaign when they are ready to market a specific product, program or service, instead of sending out a single announcement. The campaign I recommend typically includes a minimum of three emails.
Same goes for an offline mailing. You need to plan a campaign, with more than one mailing, in order to truly get and discern a return on your investment.
3. Go cheap the first time
Something I learned when I was the PR director for a university was NOT to do an expensive mailing until we had cleaned our list. Peoples’ addresses change for a variety of reasons and you may not always have the most up-to-date ones when you’re ready to send your mailing.
So, here’s a tip to clean your list before you start investing in some higher-end mailers. Send a postcard that has your return address on it to your current list. Then update your list via the returned postcards you get. Then make sure you have your return address on every mailing you do to keep your list as up-to-date as possible.
4. Keep it simple
Do a postcard, which gets read right away, with a simple, direct, compelling message and an immediate call to action, with graphics that don’t distract but support your message.
5. Track your mailings
The easiest way to do this is to send your readers to a simple website address (URL) that you only use for the purposes of that mailing. All you have to do is redirect that URL to your existing web page (where your offer resides) using the tracking link feature in your shopping cart. That way you can tell how many people typed in the URL and how many people took advantage of your offer. This is how you measure your return on your investment.
Getting started with adding direct mail to your marketing mix isn’t difficult. And by combining your online strategies with offline ones, you’ll be gaining a lot more clients and customers and bringing in a lot more income.
Taking my struggling consulting business online and following the business model I now do turned everything around for me, financially and otherwise. So when I started hearing from my mentors that I might want to add some offline marketing tactics back into the mix, I was hesitant to say the least.
But then I started studying and learning more about some specific direct mail strategies, and recognizing the power they have, I started wondering in maybe I wasn’t missing an important piece of the puzzle to take my business up another notch.
Then I started seeing some amazing results from my colleagues who were using direct mail in addition to their online marketing efforts – things as simple as a postcard – and I decided I needed to get into this game myself. (I’ll keep you posted on my own results in a future article.)
How do you get started adding direct mail marketing to your mix? Here are 5 simple steps:
1. Start collecting physical addresses
You may have the addresses of those clients and customers who have purchased from you already, which is a great start. But you also want to start collecting snail mail addresses from those people who sign up for your list. This way, when you’re ready to send a physical mailing out, you’ll have all the information you need. AND, as email deliverability gets muddier, you’ll always have this other option of reaching your audience.
2. Plan a campaign
I always tell my clients to plan an online promotion campaign when they are ready to market a specific product, program or service, instead of sending out a single announcement. The campaign I recommend typically includes a minimum of three emails.
Same goes for an offline mailing. You need to plan a campaign, with more than one mailing, in order to truly get and discern a return on your investment.
3. Go cheap the first time
Something I learned when I was the PR director for a university was NOT to do an expensive mailing until we had cleaned our list. Peoples’ addresses change for a variety of reasons and you may not always have the most up-to-date ones when you’re ready to send your mailing.
So, here’s a tip to clean your list before you start investing in some higher-end mailers. Send a postcard that has your return address on it to your current list. Then update your list via the returned postcards you get. Then make sure you have your return address on every mailing you do to keep your list as up-to-date as possible.
4. Keep it simple
Do a postcard, which gets read right away, with a simple, direct, compelling message and an immediate call to action, with graphics that don’t distract but support your message.
5. Track your mailings
The easiest way to do this is to send your readers to a simple website address (URL) that you only use for the purposes of that mailing. All you have to do is redirect that URL to your existing web page (where your offer resides) using the tracking link feature in your shopping cart. That way you can tell how many people typed in the URL and how many people took advantage of your offer. This is how you measure your return on your investment.
Getting started with adding direct mail to your marketing mix isn’t difficult. And by combining your online strategies with offline ones, you’ll be gaining a lot more clients and customers and bringing in a lot more income.
