Traditional advertising and marketing is clumsy and unwieldy when compared to the more modern online marketing (such as SEO). Consider the following benefits inherent in choosing an online marketing campaign over the traditional approaches (Print, broadcast, outdoor.).
Quality Exposure
With traditional marketing your brand is exposed to many potential customers and clients, but how many of these people are actually interested in what you are selling? Using the Internet and search engines as a medium to reach your target market, you guarantee that people find you when they’re interested in the service you have to offer. Think of it as something akin to a proactive yellow pages. SEO aims at building this exposure as well as streamlining it, ensuring quality leads.
Cost-effective Exposure
As stated above, not everyone you’re exposed to through traditional media will be interested in what you’re offering. The catch is that, though exposure to these people might not bring you business, you still have to pay for their viewing your advertisement. If you have an advertisement in a magazine, you pay for all the people that could potentially see your advert. The higher the magazines readership, the more you pay. Even with pay-per-click (PPC) and other forms of paid online marketing you only pay for the views of people who are interested in your service/products. SEO is even more cost-effective, in the long run, providing quality exposure for a relatively small financial investment.
Prime Position
With traditional advertising you pay more to have your advert displayed in a place where it’ll be viewed by the most people (A billboard on a busy highway, a two-page spread in the front of a popular magazine etc). With successful online marketing your position is always prime position. Good SEO will help you rise in the search engine results pages for relevant searches, making sure you’re right there when people want you.
In Conclusion
At the end of the day, traditional marketing is great for building brand exposure if you have a large budget for marketing. Offline marketing has an in-your-face approach, making sure that people know you exist. With a substantial marketing budget you can help ensure your company is the first one people think of when a certain product or service type comes to mind.
This is great for big businesses, with large quantities of money to sink into massive marketing schemes, but for the small- to mid-sized businesses, online marketing is the only way to go, providing a level and quality of exposure comparable to that of big businesses for a relatively small investment.