Traditional vs. web marketing

Last week we took a glimpse at the “ancient” methods being adopted by many companies in terms of marketing campaign. I am not saying though that the methods are ineffective. In fact, many of them work like an old Porsche in good condition. But a Porsche is a Porsche and not everyone can afford to buy it thus, a business with smaller budgets will always find it difficult to make even the slightest dent on the market space no matter how good the product the company has or how pleasant the service it provides.

But thank goodness there’s the internet. Companies are now able to reach out and send their marketing messages to as many customers they wish by putting up their website to flaunt their wares and service offerings. However, the internet has its own caveat. A website that’s dressed like a Benz will never get the attention of customers if nobody sees it. Investing on a website where nobody knows that it’s there in the first place only translates to a worthless and wasteful effort on the part of the company that it’s better to put it down than let it sit there for nothing.

In other words, you need to tell your customers that you exist in the virtual world.

So when is the best time to tell the whole world about your website? Well, yesterday! The moment that your website is born is like also having a new-born baby that you shout to the world “It’s a girl!” The campaign starts at day one when your site is up and running in the web space.

But how do you get it started? That’s also another question. You need some people to help you tell your customers that you’re at their service. “Ah, I need an advertising agency!” Don’t be too hasty. Not all ad agencies know the nuts and bolts of internet promotion. Most ad agencies are only excellent in traditional campaigns like print, TV and radio. Internet campaigns are quite different because it uses more than just taglines and hip visuals. It employs several tools to tap “organic network” to drive customers to visit your website. These tools may come in terms of optimizing your website so that people who search for your products or services will find you easily in search engines. 

Another popular tool that is currently employed by web marketers is what we call “contextual advertising.” Contextual advertising is the ads that you find in Google, Bing or Yahoo after you make a search and more recently, the ads that you see on Facebook and Youtube. 

Unlike traditional advertising, web advertising is highly measurable. You will see right away who’s visiting your site, where they come from, the pages they visit and the time spent on those pages they read. In fact, the reason why online advertising continues to grow steadily globally is because it’s cheap, effective and allows for greater accountability on the part web marketers. And one thing that you can do with online advertising that traditional methods cannot do is that you can revise or tweak your campaigns at any given time. Best of it all, you spend little in production cost – no props, no gaffers, no actors, and those expensive accessories you ordinarily find when you film or shoot an advertisement.

But as I was saying, you don’t need an ad agency to do this job for you because not all advertising agencies have the expertise or the tools to engage in such kind of campaign. I’m sure you will be surprised if I’m going to tell you that online marketing can be learned by just about anyone who has the time to get their hands on the internet and do their own research. But of course, nothing beats the experience and the network of those who have been doing it as a profession. And I am quite amazed that Cebu is abundant of web marketers skilled in the art of search engine optimization (SEO), contextual advertising and social media marketing. Like I said before, you can look them up in IT economic zones or if you’re just too lazy to look around, just shoot me an email and I will give you a list of my recommendations.

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