Date Published: 17-Aug-2012 | By: Lynda S White
Traditional marketing was once a popular method of marketing for all the businesses. Most of the advertisers used to target mass audience through different mediums like print, television, radio, etc. But with advent of the Internet, the last few years have seen a shift from traditional marketing to Internet marketing. The effectiveness of Internet marketing made many businesses adopt this new marketing strategy in today’s competitive world. Some of the benefits of Internet marketing over the traditional marketing are listed below.
Global exposure
The biggest advantage of the Internet marketing is the global exposure it gives to a business and its products/services. It has helped the businesses to break the common barriers of international marketing like communication, location, currency, etc. Internet marketing enables any business to reach its global clients with greater ease and also makes their business well known internationally without spending hefty amounts on advertising. Unlike traditional marketing which has limited reach, the Internet marketing reaches wider range of audience in less time.
Targeted marketing
Though traditional marketing, to some extent, enables targeted marketing (by choosing particular TV/radio show), it can never perform as precisely as how Internet marketing does. It enables you to specifically target a group of customers which you think are more likely to buy your products. For instance, if you want to target young people between the age group of 20-25 years, you need to concentrate and advertise more on the sites where they spend most of their time (Eg: Online shopping stores).
Quickest way of promotion
Internet marketing has become widely popular as the efficient, fastest, and the most flexible medium of promoting products/services. Compared to traditional marketing, which is time consuming and rigid (no option to format the ad as and when required), Internet marketing enables you to instantly update a page/ad with latest products and offers. This is an effective way of promotion, as it facilitates faster and better reach to the audiences.
Real time results
Internet marketing enables the business to see real-time impact of the marketing strategies. As the results are quick, a business can easily know where it is going wrong. Thus, by analyzing the problematic areas, the business can take measures to rectify the mistake or can completely change to a new and better strategy.
Educate consumers
One added benefit with Internet marketing is that it helps the business to educate the consumer using their website. Having good quality content and useful information not only educates and engages the customers but also converts them into loyal customers.
24/7 advertising
Promotion of a product/service through traditional means like TV, print or radio ads, is time bound. A business cannot have flexibility to continuously display/play their ads 24/7. Whereas in Internet marketing, your product promotion is visible 24/7 which encourages the user to visit your website, know about your product, make purchase at their convenience and comfort.
Measurable
Unlike traditional marketing, where it is difficult to measure the number of sales generated and their impact on the business, Internet marketing is measurable. You can track the number of visitors to the site, demographics, trends in traffic growth, number of searches per product, number of purchases, etc. Based on this data you can easily calculate the return on investment (ROI) generated from a particular promotional strategy and can clearly see the overall value added by it to the business.
Inexpensive
As discussed earlier, traditional marketing is less effective and expensive. In contrast, Internet marketing is more effective as well as low cost advertising strategy which reaches millions of people in no time.
From all the above benefits, it is clear that Internet marketing is much effective than the traditional marketing. However, designing a perfect online marketing strategy specific to your business is essential in order to achieve positive results. For that, you need to take the help of a professional Internet marketing company which uses its expertise to define effective marketing strategies to promote your products and grow your business online.
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