website. Think of your website as the public face of your
company. Where before customers would visit or phone your office to find out
about your products or to make business arrangements, this can now all be
done on the official website. A website can offer additional features, like useful
resources, online shopping and customer support.
• Direct postal mail > email. Email is the targeted, personalised equivalent of
traditional posted direct mail. It has several advantages. Firstly, it is much
easier for the client to act on the information if you include a link or a fill-in
form for a competition. Secondly, it is easy for the customer to opt out of
the advertising, making it less intrusive – or they can share it further if they
find the content useful. Thirdly, it is much easier to construct a specifically
targeted list online, due to the wide availability of demographic information.
And finally, email marketing is cheaper and quicker, since there is no printing
or posting involved – which also makes following up and answering questions
easy.
• Traditional advertising > online advertising. Print, radio and television
advertising usually requires a large investment upfront for creation, and a
second large sum for placement. Online advertising carries a much lower risk,
since it can be fully controlled, changed, retracted and modified at any time.
The more targeted the advert, the more likely you are to generate qualified
leads and higher returns.
• Surveys, polls and market research > web analytics. The traditional way of
measuring the effectiveness of a marketing campaign was to take survey and
polls of consumers and to measure the effect on the company’s income; both
quite blunt and subjective measures. Web analytics are very different – they
allow absolute and precise measurement of every activity that your marketing
material is involved in, giving you the best picture of what works.
• Traditional PR > web PR. Traditional PR usually happens behind closed doors,
as individual problems and complaints can be dealt with in private, or on the
large scale, through impersonal broadcast media. On the web, PR takes on an
entirely different dimension, because anyone can read what others are saying
about your company. If the message is bad, a substantial crisis can occur.
Brand management and PR are incredibly important on the web, because even
one dissident voice can have a marked effect.
• Word of mouth > viral. Traditional marketing relies heavily on word of mouth
to spread slogans, brand names and recommendations, and the web is no
different. However, online word of mouth has the tendency to spread virally,
as each agent is linked to exponentially increasing numbers of people down the
line. If every Facebook user has an average of 100 friends, then every profile
is just two steps away from 1 million others. Figures of this scale indicate just
why ideas can spread virally on the web.