In my own personal experiences, I get more respond and better ROI with offline marketing medium than online marketing medium. In my opinion, online marketing allows you to start a marketing campaign with smaller budget but in the long run you end up paying more for a less than satisfactory ROI, while offline marketing needs at least a decent amount of money to start but it gives you better result in terms of sales. I guess if a person saw an ad on a newspaper, billboard, mug or anything offline and go online to check out your site, it also means that he/she is already interested in your product/service that you had to offer while online medium tends to be people who are either comparing products/service or just burning time. What's your opinion on this? Do you prefer online or offline marketing for your websites/online businesses?
Yes, I generally agree to your point of view. Every Internet based company once it matures it doomed to broaden its marketing efforts and go into offline marketing since traditional channels tend to work out better in the long run. They've been heavily tested and proved to be effective.
The guy I work for is about to truly test this concept. He has a website, and he paid $2500 for a booth to be built and the rent paid to be placed inside an indoor flea market. I'm not really sure, this is going to bring a satisfactory ROI. He's even hiring people to run the booth to show people the site on a laptop and pass out business cards, etc... I have mixed feelings about it. It's either going to be wildly more successful than I ever thought. To me, if you have an online business you should spend the majority of your advertising focus online. Or, this is going to go down in a huge, fiery, explosion. Either, way, it doesn't really matter, it's not my money on the line. However, the beautiful part is, I'll get to see the results first hand. If it's a success, I can steal the idea. LOL. If it's a failure, I can avoid that money pit. Jason
But in my experience I got more touch with Online Marketing.The main thing is before doing marketing is : 1) Product - if the product is related to computer/internet then its better to do Online marketing 2) Area/Country - the place of marketing is also very important.In our country like India if ur only doing online marketing then the company cannot live. Thankz
It's going to vary for everyone. You need to know your target market, and how they can be best influenced. For new and smaller sites, online marketing is a good start. But depending on your audience, offline marketing methods might work extremely well... just look at poker sites and such buying television ads to reach masses of men sitting around in front of the tube... effective. Know your market.
I agree with this statement. Making general statements about the success of online vs offline marketing is difficult because it is going to depend on the niche/market that you are marketing to. Just my two cents!
jhmatten has provided some insightful advice. I would like to add a bit more information. From my experience if you can find a happy medium between online and offline marketing you can see some significant returns and it doesn't have to cost a whole lot to accomplish. Online marketing tends to give you a potentially large user base and allows you to reach markets world wide, while offline marketing tends to be concentrated specifically to the market audience in your local market area. I tend to try to marry both my online and offline marketing in such a way that I can compliment each other. For example I may make an offer available to offline audiences and drive their eyeballs to the website in order to claim the offer. The objective is to familarize offline audiences with our website, services and products without having to INITIALLY visit our brick-mortar business. I may also make online offers available that are only redeemable at our offline store. The intent of this is to draw audiences to our local brick-motar business as there are products that we do not advertise to our online users due to availability or whatever. This also helps put a real face behind our business and increase the confidence of any potential customer. An interesting trend I am seeing is that more and more LOCAL consumers use the internet to source products BEFORE they turn to the paper based yellowpages. It is becoming more and more critical for business to get online regardless of their size. It is equally as important for these same businesses to effectively optimize their sites in order to make it into the SERPs for their specific product lines. eg: New York Interior Design . In short, there are very many vairables that will dictate which type of marketing is better, but if you do both, in a cohesive and complimenting manner everything will come out in the wash. What you don't make online you will make offline and ... what you don't make offline you will make online. hope this helps!
Online is always cheaper, but in offline like newspapers and tvs the auditory is so big, but you need more money.
I think it really depends on what you are marketing. For example, if you take the example of YOUTUBE - do they need to advertise on Television? All their revenue is from online marketing. I think it depends on what will bring the best ROI. However, having said that I believe Online Marketing is still the main market that advertisers are constantly exploring.
I'll agree that while offline might be good for some niches, others will not get very far with offline marketing methods. All my marketing is done online and I plan for it to stay that way, since I only use free advertising.
It really depends on your niche and your budget! Offline marketing will generally cost you a lot more and it may be better. I am a firm believer that if you bring something good to the table , that people will find you eventually. Google is a prime example, they didnt advertise. I remember when they only got 10,000 hits a day.
Offline marketing really doesn't have to cost more. That's just a misconception a lot of online entrepreneurs have. You can spend a lot on offline marketing, or you can spend nothing and still get results... just like you can on the Web.
here here !!! Here's a few ideas to ponder .... Check out your local 7-11's bulletin boards? (free) Tons of bulletin boards at college campuses (free). Put decals on your car (fairly inexpensive). Many trendy coffee shops have free announcement boards. (free) Some localiized classifieds ads offer free listings (in my area). Submit original and well written articles to niche publications (mine pays me!!!) Submit original articles to publication that give away their copies (free) Sponsor a church's newsletter (inexpensive) Sponsor a community newsletter (inexpensive) Make yourself or your site news worthy, local media will write about you /your site (free) and there are many more .. all you have to do is look for them.
Create and form control ad campaigns online (those that have maximized CTR). Then take those winning ads offline. What I do is advertise that same online ad in a offline magazine in the same niche. For offline marketing, study legendary offline dudes like: Dan Kennedy, Ted Nicholas, Gary Halbery