Does Internet Marketing really generate Business ?

Marcel Proust had said that right. Everything needs to be changed with time otherwise it will go vague.

When it comes to business, it becomes more important to identify the environment and act accordingly in order to attain a sustainable competitive advantage.

The most important factor to generate profit for the organization is the efficiency of marketing strategy. Companies are using variety of marketing techniques to increase their sales. Some techniques are more trusted than others. But what about online marketing? Does it really work or is it just a buzz?

Sensation of internet had made traditional marketing an ‘old school’. But why people consider it better than real time marketing? Let us find out by comparing them in a logical manner. Traditional vs internet marketing Traditional marketing is the strategy to persuade customers to buy a particular product or service by traditional means such as billboards, posters, advertisements through television, radio and so on.

The basic idea is to sell your offering where people spend time even if it is a virtual place like the internet. Latest trends have made it clear that people are so addicted to the internet that they prefer a virtual world rather than real-time human interactions. Leveraging internet is so much better than traditional marketing for so many reasons. Let us compare both and see which one has more density in terms of profit.

Traditional Marketing vs Online Marketing

Evaluation of Marketing campaign:- Measuring results are very important to identify the strength and weakness of the organization which is very hard in case of traditional marketing.for example, let’s say a company has placed some posters in a particular area for promotion. Now the company has no clue that how many people have seen that ad and how did they find it. on the other hand, internet marketing provide clear and quantifiable results, for example, a company started a campaign on Facebook . Now the company can clearly identify the response of customers in terms of the number of likes, shares, and comments. That is a great advantage of internet marketing over traditional marketing.

Return on Investment: Profit making is all about the reduction in cost. Before you go for any marketing campaign, you have to identify how much it will cost for the company.

Internet marketing is cheaper than traditional marketing and provides the same or even better results in much lower price and wastage of valuable resources and efforts. Most of it is free and even when you pay, you get the real advantage for whatever you have paid.

Brand Building:A few years ago, building brand equity used to be very hard and time taking and not easy to maintain. But now the internet has made it possible to build brand value in very short time. Many giant companies are now using internet for their brand promotion and getting great results out of it. Even some of the companies rely just on the internet for marketing their product or services.

Equal opportunity for all companies: The internet is not biased and gives fair and equal advantage and opportunity to the firms. There is a simple rule to be the best on the internet, the one who provides maximum value to the people will outsmart others'.

Effect of environmental factors: The success of traditional marketing depends on so many environmental factors like social issues, cultural issues, political issues etc but with internet marketing there are less number of constraints that reduce the chances of uncertainty in future which is unlikely in case of real-time marketing. So we just discussed so many reasons why internet marketing is so important for firms to grow but let us go ahead on the other side of the coin. Now here are some disadvantages of internet marketing over traditional marketing.

Dynamic Nature: The internet is very dynamic and changes every now and then. Here you will adopt a thing and next moment you see that had become vague. To cope up with an online market is extensive and time-consuming. Top management does not expect to devote so much time to explore the ever-changing internet.

Irreversible Image: It is said that once being on the internet, content is not going to come back. So here, brands need to be very careful with the way they do their branding through the internet. You cannot delete the content 100% on the internet. In case if you develop a negative brand image, it will be really hard to nullify the prior image.

No Puffery: Puffery is the process in which marketing people exaggerate the image of a product or service in a way to make it look more persuasive.

Too much puffery is done using traditional marketing but using internet marketing you cant just fool people e. g. , a bad product presented as a great product will still have reviews on the internet so people will obviously find out its worth . This is actually good from the point of view of customers but as a company, you have a disadvantage that puffery will not work here.

So we have compared the pros and cons of internet marketing. Obviously, benefits are overpowering the disadvantages. Internet marketing is not just ‘the new cool’. It actually generates profits, so, no choice! Do you want to make above-normal profits out of your business? You got to trust the potential of internet marketing. It is the future-centric way to sell your things. So leverage the technology and see the real results in no time ‘if done in a certain way'