According to statistics, about 39% of marketers believed in the efficiency of offline marketing campaigns, while a whopping 78% were ardent believers in digital campaigns and their numerous benefits. While offline marketing has its fair share of benefits, from building a personal touch with the customers to reusability, they are equally limited in scope in many ways.
It is hardly surprising that most companies have switched from offline to online marketing or integrated the two to enjoy their advantages. It is much more convenient, allows for easy tracking, enables you to identify your target audience, and even costs less than traditional advertising methods.
But how can you switch from offline to digital marketing, what are its benefits, and other details you must know? Continue reading to find out.
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Reasons to Shift from Offline to Online Marketing
Even though offline marketing methods like radio ads, billboard advertising, television ads, newspapers, magazines, brochures, and other printed materials have some benefits, they are limited in scope. It is not surprising that almost many marketing professionals prefer content, social media, video, and email marketing.
While 82% of experienced marketers prefer content-based marketing, companies prefer social media platforms like Facebook to distribute their online content. Here are the benefits of online marketing over traditional methods.
It Saves You Plenty of Money
Traditional advertising requires plenty of printing, publishing, and personal distribution channels, which involves a significant investment. You could spend only a fraction of that in the digital sector to benefit from SEO, PPC, social media marketing, online banner ads, and other methods.
You Can Reach More Customers
Despite your best efforts, you will have a limited audience reach with offline marketing. Even if your target customers live in a specific area, you might be unable to reach all of them or, at times, not even connect with the target audience. Switching to online marketing will expand your customer base immediately since a substantial section of the population conduct their purchases and transactions online.
Data shows that about 84% of the customers purchased a product after watching a video about it online, while most people had more chances of buying a product that they saw on Youtube.
Track Your Marketing Campaign
Even if your marketing campaign were attractive, targeted at the right audience, and incorporated the best practices, it would be ineffective if you could not track it. With online marketing, you can use various analytical tools and software to determine your customer’s response, satisfaction level, and whether the campaign is producing the desired results.
Suppose you are a small business or startup. In that case, you can use online tracking tools to expand your customer base online by checking which social media platform’s content brought in the most amount of traffic. You can also enhance the content on those pages with more visibility among online users.
Enhance Your Customer Contact
Traditional marketing has the obvious disadvantage of not keeping you connected continuously with your customers, which digital advertising does pretty efficiently. However, enhanced customer engagement results in improved brand credibility.
If your customers have queries regarding a product or service, they can contact a virtual assistant or online chatbot 24×7. You can also connect better with your customers through capture pages (a capture page enables visitors to your webpage to share their email addresses) to inform them about your product.
Integrating Offline and Online Marketing Strategies
Even though online advertising enjoys considerable advantages over traditional methods, integrating the two methods enables you to benefit from both. Combining the two strategies allows you to reach two different audiences simultaneously. You persuade your offline customers to interact with your online medium by using CTAs, URLs, email addresses, and social media presence on printed materials like newsletters and brochures.
Simultaneously, you could include online content in your printed materials. You will expand your customer base significantly, lead to higher audience engagement, track your campaign, increase your brand’s visibility, and stand out from your competitors in the industry.
Why Must Startups Use Online Marketing?
Well-established businesses can afford to invest considerable sums of money into offline marketing campaigns. However, startups are usually short of funds, and even if they are not, it is advisable to invest those funds wisely. Opting for the digital medium will allow you to reach a wider audience quickly.
It is an effective way to know the customer’s response to your product, identify the target audience, and create brand awareness across various digital platforms without requiring a significant investment. Since you can directly target customers who are most responsive to your product, it yields an impressive ROI in the long run.
These are some reasons to switch from offline to online marketing or integrate the two whenever required. This approach will enable you to expand your customer base, attract new potential customers, gain valuable market insights, generate online traffic and increase sales and profits in the long run.
