William King asked:


One of the most critical aspects of running a business is marketing. It encompasses every customer related task from creating awareness to customer satisfaction and retention. One may go as far as to say that a business cannot survive or even start up without it. In the current scenario, marketing has become a complex and sophisticated function, especially now that an increasing number of businesses choose to start up online. Now, along with the traditional offline marketing tools, there are a number of web marketing tools and methods available. These web marketing methods must be mastered for any level of success in online business.

The differences that separate web marketing from offline marketing are as below:

• Snail mail vs. email – Email marketing is low cost, efficient, instant and effective means of generating customers. Snail mail is slow, generally more expensive and is losing some of its efficacy with the influx of TV and Internet.

• Limited radius of impact vs. unlimited – The target audience is global in the case of web marketing with the Internet shrinking the world. The radius of offline marketing is limited by physical, political and time barriers.

• Web customers are looking for a product or service similar to yours – The beauty of being an online business is that people log on to look for a service or product that you can offer. Whereas, offline businesses have to rely more on push marketing than the pull effect.

• Long, complex process of making a sale vs. instant conversion – A few clicks of a mouse and the product is sold, in the case of web marketing. Offline marketing process is time and manpower heavy, from generating leads to making a sale.

• Fixed office hours vs. 24 hour store – An online business can sell its products 24 hours a day while an offline business will open and shut at particular hours.

• Advertising in print, TV and radio is expensive – While you can easily offer content, audio and video clips on the Internet for a very low cost.

• Pay for time spots vs. unlimited time and space – Ads in offline marketing mediums are for a limited time only and you pay for time slots and space. In an online marketing scenario, you would keep your ads up for a longer time and pay much less.

• Cost per incremental customer – This cost is very low for web marketing based concerns, whereas this cost is appreciable in case of offline marketing efforts.

• Targeted approach vs. blanket approach – The above reason leads offline marketing businesses to target and select carefully, eliminating a lot of potential customers, who may buy in the future if not the present. However, low incremental costs result in online businesses covering a broad spectrum of the market.

• Segmentation – Preferences are much easier to track for an online business and this means that segmentation is simpler. The web marketing effort has the information it needs to customize its pitch at once.

• Customer contact – Access to customer information is automatic in the case of online businesses and the web marketing process is simplified and made efficient. Databases and mailing lists are created in an instant. On the contrary, offline marketing efforts for the same require time, employees and money.

There are many benefits to both web marketing and offline marketing, and it is best to use a judicious mix of the two.

Adrian Bold asked:

Do you spend a considerable amount of your marketing budget on traditional offline marketing approaches such as radio, television and newspaper advertising? You could be significantly losing out.

Like it or not, the coming of Internet Marketing has sounded the death-knell for traditional methods of marketing and associated advertising. Newspapers are rapidly shedding staff; even the UK’s Channel 4 Television can no longer survive without merging with another channel due to the drop in advertising revenue it had previously relied upon.

So why is offline marketing dying off?

Compare the traditional direct mail marketing technique with online email marketing approaches. Take a sales letter and mail it out to 10,000 people. Add up the cost of stationery and postage, even with discounts for mass postage, you need a good budget. Now compose an email, add your database of 10,000 customers and email it directly to their inbox in less than 10 seconds. The cost is nothing and you essentially require no budget.

Furthermore, recent research indicates that direct mail only generates a 2% response rate; email marketing generates 5 times as much. Offline Marketing cannot compete with these results.

Is it a surprise that traditional offline marketing methods are dying off? Their share of the market shrinking, revenue receding as the online marketing sector grows and takes over the lion’s share of the market?

If we contrast the range of offline marketing, we easily reveal an important weakness in the traditional approach. Offline marketing is limited by geographic location. Newspaper circulation or television/radio broadcasting range limits the effectiveness of the offline marketing campaign. Online marketing campaigns are geographically limitless. If you wish, you can advertise your product or service to millions of people across the entire world.

Broadcast and print advertising has always been expensive, and in their dying days, they still won’t compete with the Internet on cost. Online marketing offers targeted marketing, rather than blanket marketing at a fraction of the cost.

That neatly brings us onto the ability to target your exact customer. Offline advertising can only attempt to do this by hoping enough men are watching football, or women are watching Desperate Housewives. With the online alternative, you can target the very customers that are already looking for your products or services. Again, offline marketing cannot compete with this level of accuracy in finding customers and bringing them to your website.

Using Internet Marketing rapidly reduces the time between a potential customer seeing your marketing and responding to it. Online marketing promotes immediate reaction, generating immediate revenue. Your customer sees your ad. The customer reads your ad, they like what they read, they check the price, and it’s good. They click to add the product to the shopping cart; they fill in their details and click to pay. Within three clicks or so, you’ve made a sale. Traditional marketing methods simply cannot produce these rapid results, or the volume of increased business that they are capable of producing.

Whilst some people will cling on to offline marketing, suspicious of the Internet’s success, their competitors using online marketing are increasing their sales by the hour.