Traditional Vs Online marketing

[Niknak]

Hi

The MD at my company is very skeptical of online marketing, as he thinks it doesn't translate to sales very well. Given that with outdoor, radio and print, there is no way to quantify ROI. With online you can. However, at the moment, calls to action, clicks thru's and actual sales are notoriously low compared with the huge number of impressions banners receive.

In the defence of online - Whereas outdoor, radio and print is time limited, i.e. will run for a week or two, online, once on a website in the form of editorial is there forever when anyone searches or surfs. This is far more effective for longevity of sales after the initial splash.

Does anyone agree or disagree?

Be nice to read your thoughts.

Thanks

Nick

[fisicx]

Banners?

They have never had a very good CTR. If you get 1% you are doing very well but it is more likely to be 0.1%. And of those visitors the best you can usually hope for is 2% converting. In other words, on a good day you will convert 1 customer for every 5000 impressions.

Why don't you take the ad-words plunge. I manage a site that is getting a 5 fold return on their investment.

On the other hand, local businesses will often do better using offline marketing, it all depends on your target customers.

[logoquality]

I think with online marketing (offline too) it's pretty much a numbers game. The more exposure you can get the more business will follow.

You need to try different things. Like banners, adwords, articles, news, etc etc. The secret is working out how many visitors you need to make a sale.

Once you know that number you should be able to work out what you need to do to double, tripple, quadruple sales. Online is not hard but it does take a lot of effort. You need to do lots and lots of little things as often as possible.

Forum posting is one of those small things.

Simon

[Elquicos]

I personally find that measuring the ROI of banners is as difficult as measuring the ROI of offline advertising. Reason being is that it's difficult to get a direct response campaign with banners, so it's more about branding. Therefore you'll see a halo effect on other traffic sources but that's difficult to measure. If you want to invest in something which ROI can be perfectly measured, do Pay Per Click.

[keithlunt]

Pay Per Click is good, but you have to be careful about what keywords you are bidding on. Some can be very expensive with loads of traffic, others cheap with very little traffic.

One customer I built a site for started his own PPC campaign. A week later he came back asking if 1% conversion rate was typical of PPC. I convinced him to try cheaper / lower traffic keywords - his traffic went down & his orders went up - 3% conversion. Think he's about 5% now and still not listening fully.

Be specific in what you buy and don't choose words just because they have loads of traffic.

But that depends on you having a web site. Depending on your product, a small web site deriving traffic from PPC might be all that you need to test the water. If it works for you then go bigger and try for more search engine visitors.