Before the internet era, marketing and advertising was done in a way where much attempt and vigor was focused on market research and reaching to almost every potential customer. The methods of reach used to be primarily physical in nature through newspapers, brochures, hoardings, banners, television promos, etc. This involved a lot of resources and the process took a lot of time. Even after making all these attempts, success and anticipated results were not guaranteed.
With the boom of internet in the era of information technology, internet has proved to be a worthy platform to advertise brands. Advertising on world wide web ensures that almost everyone who has access to internet is able to view the ads posted by the brands. Almost every potential customer uses internet for one or the other purpose for a prolonged time.
Online advertising is beneficial in many ways
Online marketing is nowadays the most pursued method of advertising. This certainly is because of the numerous benefits that online advertising has to offer. Few of the major benefits are:
- Cost effective
The traditional or routine methods employed by marketing specialists involved a lot of manual work and resources. These used in the form of surveys, material for printing, renting the space for advertisements, paying for the printing and many more. This increases the cost of the advertising campaign and thereby increasing the cost of the product. Pursuing online marketing hence proves beneficial and cost effective for both the campaigner and the customer.
- More geographic coverage
With the help of online marketing, it is very easy to target vast geographical areas. In fact global exposure can be gained through internet marketing affecting different parts of the world. It is incredibly easy to establish brands and their recognition in customer community. In this way, internet marketing is helpful in covering local and international markets also.
- Easy to target audience
Traditional ways of marketing uses targeting methods that do not touch all spheres of customers effectively. Certain sections of customers are deprived of the product or brand information. Online marketing uses different tools like cookie tracking that tracks the internet usage behavior of a person and target him with the products as per his search and demographic considerations. This helps in targeting a most suitable customer for a specific product. Traditional way of marketing somewhere targets customers collectively to some degrees.
- Easy to measure impacts
Unlike the traditional marketing methods where the rate of success of the campaign is mostly determined by the amount of sales, more effective methods are present in the online marketing. There are lot of tools and methods to measure the success of online campaign. Accurate results can be obtained regarding the number of people visiting the website, number of people clicking on the web ads, no of viewers who watched the videos and people who liked and shared your products/services.
- Speedy approach
The traditional approach is slow and needs a lot of time for preparation of the event. The material has to be bought, it has to be printed, transported and set up at the venues. Online marketing is better than traditional marketing in this aspect. The process takes a little time designing the advertisement and posting it online takes no time.
- Brand building
Online marketing helps to a great deal in building the brand name and getting recognition in the customer community.