Search Engine Optimization and Online Marketing Blog

      

I know this has probably been discussed so many times online that everyone is an expert on the topic by now. Everybody understands the strengths and weaknesses of either form of marketing by now… But then why is it still so difficult to sell it to some top management executives or directors? If everyone knows about the awesome benefits of online marketing why are so few companies really harnessing its powers?

The answer is most people don’t understand it or have bad experiences of marketing online. The key here is simple, just like with any other traditional marketing your strategy needs to be clearly defined but before we go into that lets look at the two different forms.

Traditional marketing can be defined as any form advertising that was used prior to the Internet. The lines are definitely being blurred but this is a good rule of thumb to live by. Classic forms of this are radio, TV, billboards and flyers. Anything since then that is served using an Internet connection can be classified as an online marketing.  Online marketing includes search engine marketing, banner advertising, email marketing and quite a few more.

Now where these fundamentally differ is in the goals that they achieve. Traditional marketing has most of its power vested in building and broadening reach of businesses brands. This is definitely a key factor that no company could survive without. Online marketing on the other hand is a form of direct marketing, which means that the audience has the chance to directly respond to advertising as they are exposed to it. This vastly increases ROI as users are able to respond while they experience a need compare to traditional where they need to remember it so they can respond to it later.

Another factor that sets apart the two forms of advertising is measurability. Online marketing is the clear winner when it comes to measurability as it takes place in an environment that allows us to track our customers from the adverts they click on till they perform actions that are valuable to our business. Traditional marketing has developed some forms of tracking but they have stumbling blocks, one of the biggest being that they rely on human memory. People forget the tracking telephone number you offer them or they forget to claim the discount code which kills most tools you have to track traditional adverts. This means you will only ever be able to see a sample of the users that traditional marketing generates.

The high ROI of online marketing means even SME’s can take advantage of it and yield great results from it. They can also measure exactly where their leads are originating from and optimize their campaigns accordingly. When it come to corporate companies the combination of traditional marketing and online marketing means that prospective customers manage to find you after you have stimulated a need with traditional marketing. Not only that but the branding power of your traditional marketing campaign means that your visitors from online marketing will convert into leads or sales far higher than when using only one form.

So how do you convince your boss? Well you now have some facts to use and my favorite is measurability. The fact that you can launch an online marketing campaign and track every lead or sale generate by it means that you will be able to demonstrate the benefits even when you implement a smaller test campaign.

Directors need to make a business run sustainably and this means that it comes down to numbers for them. If you can show them the return on investment that online marketing generates they would be crazy not to buy into the idea.