These days, businesses' have been shifting their marketing budgets from traditional media to online advertising. This is due to several factors:

• Global Opportunity
• Real-Time Results
• Reduced Costs
• Long-Term Exposure
• Accurate Measurability
• Accurate Demographic Targeting
• Product Information
• Brand Engagement
• Less Intrusive
• Flexibility in Rectifying Marketing Strategies
• Target Audience Engagement

Global Opportunity

A study released by Morgan Stanley in 2009 showed that there is a USD$50 billion global opportunity for investing in online marketing in the United States. This study was based on Media Time Spent versus Ad Spend for Internet versus traditional media. The two major mediums on time spent were TV with 31% and the Internet with a close 28%, according to surveys on how much time subjects spend on four major mediums: print, radio, TV and Internet.

Real-Time Results

A major advantage of using online marketing is getting real-time results that will allow you to instantly adjust your strategy in order to ensure your campaign’s success. With real-time social monitoring tools, you can easily detect the exact problems and remedy the situation. Real-time results are found in many online marketing tools, especially in email marketing, search engine optimization (SEO) and search engine marketing (SEM).

Reduced Costs

The cost of online marketing is only a fraction of what you would normally spend on traditional marketing like television, radio, magazines and newspapers to achieve the objectives of your advertising campaign. You can get free online listing as opposed to paying for a listing in the yellow pages. You can also implement free online viral marketing using social networking websites. When you consider the results versus the spending on ads, you will definitely get a high ROI when investing in an online campaign rather than overspending your marketing budget on traditional media.

Long-Term Exposure

Some online marketing tools like SEO, SEM, social media advertising and presence, and online directory listings are considered long-term online marketing strategies. They maintain your website’s high exposure and you can increase it by continually adjusting your strategy and investing in some PPC and email marketing campaigns that will boost your search results and keep you ahead of the competition.

Accurate Measurability

Measuring the performance of a traditional marketing campaign requires a lot of work and a well-established communication or feedback process needs to be introduced to other operational departments. For example, you may choose to invest in a traditional marketing campaign and set up a feedback system in your outlets to find out how your customers heard of and rate your business. You also need to ensure that the employees who interact with your customers distribute your comment cards, questionnaires, or feedback forms, but more importantly, you also need to ensure that each customer fills in your forms and provides genuine answers. However, there is a marginal error that you are bound to face, which will limit the accuracy of tracking the direct revenue generated from your marketing campaign. Online marketing on the other hand, is a marketer’s dream come true when measuring the performance of a campaign. It is 100% accurate and will enable you to easily calculate your ROI to truly appreciate the value generated from your online marketing budget.

Demographic Targeting

Nothing compares to the accuracy of demographical targeting when using online marketing. Owing to the existence of social networking websites, email subscription databases, website registrations, and other online platforms, you can have access to a detailed demographic breakdown of the online population you choose to target. Moreover, you can select your target audience by age, location, gender, interests, profession and criteria to ensure that your marketing campaign is well received and in turn, provides you with a high materialization rate.

Product Information

Most consumers need additional information about a product or service before deciding whether to purchase it or not. The online medium offers those consumers the option to compare products or services, find out what other consumers’ feedbacks were after purchasing it, and communicate with their friends to get advice on that product or service. All these factors help create trust and confidence in a consumer to actually purchase that product or service. Fortunately, with online marketing, this is just a click away! The online infrastructure is so diverse and very accessible, thus when a consumer is on the verge of deciding whether to buy your product or service, your online marketing campaign will help sway them because many product information channels will support it.

Brand Engagement

Your website is the single most important factor in determining the success of your online marketing campaign. Every online advertising or marketing tool will direct your target audience to your website. This is where your generated traffic will decide whether to continue and discover your business or simply click that misfortunate “X” button situated on the top right hand corner of any window. Your website is where the creativity in your content and design will play a major role in attracting visitors to engage in your brand and convince them that your business is incomparable.

Less Intrusive

Online marketing is considered to be a less intrusive form of communicating with your target audience than traditional marketing. When someone purchases a newspaper, their intention is to read the news and not skim through it looking for advertisements. Alternatively, when someone searches ‘car rentals’ in a search engine website, their intention is to specifically rent a car. This way, when an online advertisement pops up, it will have to be relevant to the automobile industry. This just makes more business sense and your target audience will more likely be interested in what your business has to offer.

Flexibility

Let’s say a business decides to invest in a traditional marketing campaign and along the way they discover that the campaign is not achieving the expected results. In this case, that business needs to rectify the campaign to achieve their initial expectations. But in order to this, they will have to conduct a comprehensive marketing research to discover why that campaign is not effective. Accordingly, more money will be needed to invest into that campaign to reinforce the strategy. This is too time consuming and too costly and will consequently deliver a lower return on investment than previously expected. However, with online marketing tracking tools and analytics, that business would not experience these glitches and they could test their conversion rates cost-and time-efficiently.

Audience Engagement

Usually, when people read newspapers or magazines, they may scan through the advertisements but there is no way to engage their attention. Whereas with online marketing, you can encourage them to take action, visit your website and browse your products and services, which vastly increases the “stickiness” factor of your marketing message.

Catching your target audience’s attention requires a touch of creativity, along with a dash of interactivity and a soupçon of multimedia. Online marketing is so much more adept than traditional media in that sense. You can easily persuade your audience to receive your marketing message through relevancy, accessibility, interactivity, and creativity, while building the “wow” or “stickiness” factor of your message.

Whether you are a small business or a large organization, the bulk of your marketing budget should go towards investing in online marketing tools, simply because you are assured a higher return on your investment. However, this does not mean you should completely disregard traditional marketing. Depending on your marketing objectives and the consumer behavior of your target audience, you should be able to assess what is the most beneficial medium for your business. But, nowadays, most people have regular access to the Internet and investing in online marketing is most probably the best option.