The End of Offline Marketing?
Do you 1888 Goodwin Champions 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 the Transformers 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 Batman action figure 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.
Adrian Bold is Head of Search for Impact Media Ltd, a leading href="impactmedialtd.co.uk/">UK SEO Company who help clients in a wide range of industry sectors with their online marketing campaigns.
