Traditional Marketing vs Online Marketing

photo credit: myuibe

As the world becomes more and more dependent on the internet: Searching, finding information, knowing the latest results, latest news, and even buying products online. You can say that the future will be with the internet.

Of course, we cannot forget the traditional marketing like, newspaper ad, radio, banners and T.V commercials etc. But in all ways – they are much more expensive than using online marketing. I have a friend who provides painting services for houses and offices. This means his business is a local industry and depends on how big your country is.

You might only focus on the state that you live in only. My friend Alex has been in business for over 30 years and he offers the lowest and professional painting services in our country.

But the thing is that he has to advertise on the newspaper everyday, to get leads for his business. For your information, a small little advertising spot in Singapore, like 2cm x 4cm classified advertisement cost you SGD $80, and he is doing it daily. Let’s do the math, SGD $80 x 30 days = SGD $2,400 in a month.

If you use Pay Per Click Marketing or Search Engine Marketing, the cost would have dramatically decrease in advertising fee, and still get targeted client for your service. Pay Per Click Marketing can be a double edged sword: it can help you and it can also hurt you if you do not know how to use it. That is why you will need an expert to help you in this area.

Pay Per Click marketing can give you the clear and measurable data of the numbers of searchers and how many clicks you are paying. This is way much better than using newspaper advertising, as you will not know what are the actual numbers.

Search Engine Marketing is a way to get free traffic from the web. A lot people misunderstand that with a website -  you are already penetrating the online market as you can promote your services or products online. They is a very wrong misconception.

If they do not know how to maximize the power of online marketing, then it is better to stick with the normal way of advertising. The actual keywords to use for Search Engine Marketing has to be derived from Pay Per Click Marketing, as it will give you the actual data of online demand – which then allows you to carry out an online campaign with great accuracy.

Here is the breakdown for the different types of marketing:

Here you can see that you must use internet to advertise and leverage on its low cost and broad reach.

Of course you still need to stick to the traditional method if your marketing budget can afford it: they are the effective way of anchoring the people in your area of service. But advertisements must earn and justify itself i.e. be able to show proven and measurable results – by all means do advertising to anchor yourself are the first thing they will think of when they need your service – but this can be very expensive.