Let me say something right off the bat: I’m not one of those proponents of online marketing that doesn’t believe in using offline channels.

Offline advertising and marketing have driven sales for generations. Newspaper, magazine, television, radio and billboard advertising have all been used in highly successful (and profitable) campaigns. They can help create and enhance a brand. They can lead new customers in your direction and they can help to maintain and grow relationships with your current clients and customers.

The problem with many forms of offline marketing and advertising is that it can be extremely difficult, if not impossible to measure the precise results of a campaign. When justifying the costs of offline advertising and marketing, campaign managers often need to talk about such results in broad terms, emphasizing “brand enhancement,” or “customer awareness” because it is hard to precisely measure the impact of a single advertisement, no matter what the medium.

The beauty of online advertising and marketing is that it gives you immediate feedback on your marketing efforts, allowing you to change strategies, budgets and venues more quickly, more efficiently and more effectively than you can with offline marketing efforts.

Don’t take my word for it. Forrester Research has just issued a report showing that online marketing budgets will be growing by more than 500% over the next five years. The report estimated that in 2014 companies would be spending $6.2 billion on online and search engine marketing.

Here are just some of the advantages of online marketing:

• Enhanced Tracking- The ability to track results instantaneously: Online analytics, including Google Analytics, CoreMetrics, and Omniture, give you the chance to benchmark your campaigns and then follow the results in real time. If a campaign isn’t performing well, you don’t have to wait a month to find out (like offline metrics).
• Increased Flexibility (Making changes before it is too late): With offline marketing, it often takes weeks, if not months to know if your campaign is going to be successful. With web analytics, you can see almost instantly if a campaign is working or not. Armed with this information, you can quickly put an end to an unsuccessful campaign, or invest more resources into a successful campaign.
• Targeting Your Audience: While magazines, newspapers and television shows all have “target audiences,” such targets can be fairly broad and imprecise. Often, a large segment of the target will have no interest in your product or services. Online marketing gives you the opportunity to be far more targeted towards the specific audience you are aiming for. By way of example, Facebook advertising can be narrowed so effectively that you can deliver an ad to a handful of people.
• Instant Gratification: As I’ve said earlier in this article, traditional offline advertising and marketing typically requires you to be extremely patient in getting results. There is often a disconnect between an off-line advertisement (e.g. television or a billboard) and an actual purchase. Online marketing allows you to be a few clicks away from hitting the “buy” or “submit” button on your shopping cart.
• Myriad Platforms: Online marketing gives you so many avenues to reach potential and current clients and customers. Using benchmarks, you can test the effectiveness of each of these marketing platforms and easily adjust your focus and budget accordingly:
  • E-Mail: Gives you the opportunity to deliver targeted messages with immediate calls to action. It is cheaper, easier to track and far more immediate than traditional direct mail campaigns.
  • Social Media: There is a reason why sites like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn are so enormously popular. Users of these platforms are engaging in conversations. Much of the dialog is social in nature, but a large percentage of the discussions turn to business. These sites give you the opportunity to:
    • Enhance your brand
    • Make direct sales
    • Service your customers
    • Scout the competition
    • Find great potential partners and employees
  • Search Engine Marketing: Search engine marketing has revolutionized how companies go about getting their name out to a highly targeted audience. The person who goes to the search engine is one who is generally looking not just to buy, but to buy a specific item. The two key ways of using search engine marketing are Pay Per Click placements and Search Engine Optimization.
    • Pay Per Click (PPC): This can be an extremely effective way to drive “qualified” traffic to your site, but it can also be a very expensive way of doing it. A well thought out, PPC campaign will use keywords designed to attract the customers you want going to your site. But, great placement, especially for common keywords (i.e. sports car, mortgage, golf clubs), can cost you dearly. It might be nice to attract 10,000 visitors to your site, but if it costs you $5 per visitor, you had better be getting a lot more than $50,000 in sales or business for your efforts.
    • Search Engine Optimization (SEO): Search Engine Optimization is the process of enhancing the structure and content of your website in such a way that the major search engines naturally and organically drive traffic to your site by ranking it higher in search results. While this kind of traffic is “free,” the process of making your site stand out from the rest is not cheap at all. It requires both a significant investment of time and it requires a high level of expertise from the person creating the campaign. Unlike PPC, though, once a high placement has been established, that placement will continue to drive traffic with little or no additional costs incurred.
  • Blogs: If you offer something unique or have unique insights, then a well-written blog can be a great way to drive traffic to your site. Not only are blogs picked up directly by the search engines, the blogs can be noticed by other bloggers or on other major websites. When people link to your blog, it tells the Googles of the world that you are a real player in your industry and such recognition results in higher placement.
  • Video: It may shock you, but YouTube just passed Yahoo as the No. 2 search engine. By creating an interesting, informative and creative video and posting it online, you create the opportunity for thousands, if not millions, to be exposed to your company, your brands and your services.
  • Newsletters: This is a terrific way to keep your current customers, clients and visitors informed of what is happening at your company. Retailers can tout new products or sales. Service providers can trumpet success stories. By providing information that is informative and useful to your subscriber base, you will create a revenue-generating platform that your subscribers will actually look forward to getting.
  • Banner Advertising: While click-through rates have been declining over the years, there is still a place in your online marketing arsenal for a well-crafted and well-targeted banner ad. If you can create an advertisement that captures the eye and creates a call to action, then you have an excellent chance of driving traffic to your site.

In conclusion, while there remains a place for off-line marketing and advertising, companies can’t afford not to be investing a significant percentage of their marketing budgets online.

Blue Fountain Media has been counseling clients on their online marketing efforts for many years. Do we know what we’re doing? Just check out the Google result for the search website design company.

If that got your attention, call us at 212.260.1978.

Tags: Blue Fountain Media, Forrester Research, Google, newsletters, offline marketing, Online Marketing