Benefits of online marketing

More and more businesses are realising the significant benefits of on-line marketing (also called internet marketing) compared with more traditional methods these days. That doesn’t mean the older traditional ways are redundant, a mix of both generally works well. As always, the mix and methods that suit you will be very dependent on your particular market, products, services, target audience, viewing platform (PC, laptop, tablet, mobile phone) etc.

Amongst the benefits, apart from it generally being cheaper so you can get more marketing for your money (one of the biggest attractions), on-line marketing allows you to easily measure how it is performing, track visits, do split testing so you can see if different content performs better than what you currently have etc. All marketing books and consultants will tell you that you need to measure the results of any marketing you do, otherwise you don’t know what works or doesn’t and so you can ditch or improve the stuff that doesn’t and get best return on your investment (ROI).

It also allows you to change things quickly and simply, unlike printed material for example – if you have 5000 flyers printed and you see they are not working, find an error or need to add or change something you can’t do anything about it, you have to throw them away and re-print so it can prove expensive (and wasteful). In comparison, with on-line material you can generally pause it, change it quickly and easily and start it off again.

The technology also allows easy integration of other marketing channels such as social media with your on-line presence (website, landing pages, blog, articles) making best use of multi-channel marketing – the more channels you have the better.

Another benefit of this is that it levels the playing field to a great extent so you can compete better against a larger range of competitors (including larger ones).

With the growing popularity of on-line marketing, more and more businesses are making more use of it which means you also have to keep a closer eye on your competition and market and do more to keep up with your competitors and ideally of course keep ahead of them.

Are you keeping up to date with what your competitors are doing and making best use of on-line marketing for your business ?