The choice between traditional marketing versus web marketing

Posted: Apr 28, 2011
Author: WordJack Media

You will read a lot of blogs about the decline of the yellow pages and how traditional marketing is dead. You will see tweets and facebook posts and white papers claiming that the only marketing worth considering these days is web marketing, either through an internet marketing firm, or via methods you employ yourself. Why? Because if you're reading a blog (or twitter, or facebook), the writer has obviously converted to the merits of web marketing!

It's not that simple, obviously. But when you walk into your apartment security door and see the old book sitting there for weeks at a time, you will surely wonder about the effectiveness of this media. So although this is an exceptionally complex debate for one humble blog post, let's weight up some of the characterisitcs of traditional versus web marketing and when each can be effective:

Traditional Marketing

EXAMPLES:

Yellow Pages print, Radio, Newspapers, TV, outdoor (like billboards)

STRENGTHS:

Brand awareness

Can be used to create brand awareness for larger brands. Especially good when the brand has a broad definition of their target audience.

Appropriate to come consumers

Many baby boomers are still consuming these types of media and use them to make purchase decisions.

Appropriate to some industries

Some types of purchase are very low-involvement and/or high-urgency, so quick-fix lookups like the yellow pages may be used (think tires, roof repair, locksmith, leaking taps)

WEAKNESSES:

Media Consumption

The photo attached is a moment that the yellow pages industry calls a "moment of truth" for their product. Does the consumer pick it up and take it into their house? If you can only imagine this happening for a small percentage of your customers, then it's probably not a wise media to advertise within.

Market Share

Another thing to consider is that a single channel of media (like TV or YellowPages) do not cover 100% of your target population as they once may have. Often the pricing doesn't reflect this declining market share. So consider how much you're considering spending and what you'll actually get for it!

Measures of effectiveness

These media are often difficult to prove effectiveness or disprove it. But do your best to gain evidence of effectiveness. If you put an ad in the yellow pages, radio or classifieds, don't dream of doing so without a unique phone number to track the calls that come in! (or ask your customers where they heard about you)

Web marketing

EXAMPLES:

Social media (facebook, twitter and more), online coupon marketing, video marketing, blogging, email marketing, mobile marketing, pay-for-performance campaigns, etc

STRENGTHS:

Highly Targeted

You appreciate what this point is all about as soon as you place an ad on facebook and choose to only show your ad to 18-29 year old females who live in Atlanta, like jogging and are not currently in a relationship! Placing ads with Google AdWords provides similar intelligence, but there are less blatent forms of targeting, like blogging on a point of interest, and building a followership that are drawn to those articles.

Easy to measure

Whether this is clicks, time on site, bounce rate, video plays, video dropout rate, email open & forward rates, coupon redemption or some other measure....these are all highly possible in web marketing and more importantly, easy to implement!

Flexibility of budget and audience

The point is you can get started with $10, or even for free by setting up a facebook page, twitter account, google analytics, email marketing accounts, creating videos on youtube and distributing them throughout the web, asking customers to give you reviews on yelp, claiming your profiles on google, yelp, bing, hotfrog, etc, etc. There are plenty of paid options and options to target all sorts of people. And you can choose your level of spend!

WEAKNESSES:

Time consuming

Of course there is a downside! If you were really into this, you could spend 8 hours a day doing the web marketing activity for your business! You could probably even get away with spending very little money. But there is always a cost to this and whether that's less time with your customers, or less time with your family, you should always consider whether this is worth it! An internet marketing firm or web agency can do a lot of this for you, so always consider what you can get for your marketing spend, how much time you're spending and what your time is worth.

It always pays to think about these things and evaluate this regularly. You may find you don't need to spend any additional time or money, you just need to re-allocate what you're spending on bringing new customers into your business!