When it comes to advertising, most marketers or business owners want to spend the least money to achieve A LOT. Which is just like throwing a small size grenade to cause a big explosion.
After a reality check, most figures that if you are only spending a tiny bit in advertising, you are not going to get result like a grenade could.
However, things are different now after we are exposed to the world of Internet. It gives us a totally new platform and a new world for marketers to harness, and yes finally it won’t cause you an arm and leg to achieve a good return on investment.
Few examples of offline advertising:
- Catalogues
- Flyers
- TV commercials
- Radio commercials
- Billboards
- Newspapers, Magazines
As compared to online advertising:
- Website
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
- Social Media Marketing
- Pay Per Click (PPC)
- Viral Marketing
- Email Marketing
Let’s talk about some amazing advantages of online advertising have over offline advertising.
1. Much lower cost
Obviously this is one of the most amazing advantage of online advertising. Most online advertising methods cost much lesser to execute. This allows new start-ups and small business to shine as they can now allocate a small budget in advertising, instead of nothing at all.
The cost of doing Facebook Advertising can be as low as RM5 per day, this can already help you to secure a spot in the most popular social network today.
So does this mean it will be harder for big brands and enterprises to be dominant? Yes and no. Think of it an opportunity for the small businesses to market their stuffs, but you can always go for a more heavy investment approach, like doing Viral marketing and PPC for popular keywords.
Nevertheless, spending money in doing online advertisements will surely be cheaper than spending up to hundred of thousands in billboards, newspaper, magazines and TV commercials.
2. More control
You are in full control when it comes to online advertising. What you could not control in offline can now be controlled online.
You can not control who is going to read and see your ads when you are doing TV commercial, newspaper and billboard. Yes you can control it slightly by advertising on specific newspaper or channels which have most of your target audience, but this is still a very broad style of targeting.
In online advertising, there’s a lot of targeting option you can control to display your ads to. Age, location, gender, interest etc. are the attributes that you can specify and target.
As a result, your ads will reach the most potential customers of your own niche or target market!
3. Not limited by locations or time
What if I tell you, when you advertise online, your reach is now GLOBAL? Paying thousands just to display a short 15 seconds TV commercial that will only shows on 1 channel in a single country, that is quite pathetic.
If you are advertising online, you can now set to display your ads throughout the world, or scope down to only a state, or even a district in some cases!
There’s also no limitation on time, you can advertise at any time you want, not like radio or magazine, which you have to pre-plan the schedule and time to get the best exposure.
4. Measurable Result and Follow up
How can you tell how many people had watch your TV commercial, how many listened to your radio ads and how many actually read your ads in newspaper? The answer is you can’t.
Your offline advertising agency will give you a sweet estimated numbers that makes you feel “great”, like “You can reach 500k of our readers by advertising on the first page!”, sounds really promising isn’t it?
After a week of advertising, you realize there’s no enquiry or sales, then you start to question the agency and ask them why. Even if there’s a lot of people who have seen and interested in products, but still in the ‘considering’ stage, how are you going to follow up with these people to close the sales as you don’t know who are they at all.
Well don’t put the blame on the agency, as there’s simply no tool out there to measure how effective are these offline campaigns.
As online advertising is more systematic, you can know how many people actually “seen” and “clicked” on your ads, that’s really handy isn’t it?
Best of all, you can also collect information from the “interested users” and follow up on the sales in future since you already have their contacts.
Online advertising may have advantages over offline, but most people can’t get it right the first time, or even after a lot of times.
If you want to save yourself sometime, always outsource your online marketing campaigns to an agency, or a marketer.
Sanz Teoh
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