Recently, I was meeting with a potential client and he scoffed at the proposal I had brought to him.
“Are you selling me snake oil?”
“We can do all of this ourselves.”
From time to time, we still talk to companies who just don’t get online marketing. This very same client recently purchased a billboard and some TV ads. Let’s say he spent $10,000 on his billboard and that it’ll be up for say 3 months. How many eyes will see his ad in that period? How many of those people’s eyes are in his target audience? How much business will his billboard generate? How many phone calls? It’s hard to say.
When we compare this to online marketing, the questions are far easier to answer and depending on the strategy, the budget can last far longer. One of the many benefits of online marketing is its measurability. We know exactly how many eyes see our client’s ads, how many visitors go to their websites, and can track the number of conversions. With Facebook, only the people in our client’s target audience will see the ads. It is still a little tricky to track the number of phone calls that come from online marketing efforts.
For the above client who only does business in Calgary – with his budget we could get 20 or 30 keywords working Naturally in Google. These would work in Google for years and years, and we’d still have enough budget left over for an Adwords and Facebook campaign.
As an example of the long lasting results of our efforts, we have held a first page position for The Haskayne School of Business for over 4 years beating out over 55 million competing web pages:
Now, we aren’t saying to abandon traditional marketing efforts all together. Billboards, newspapers, TV ads still work – they are just more expensive and more difficult to measure than online efforts. Still, I find it amazing that business owners will drop tens of thousands of dollars on a billboard or magazine ad without blinking, but will flinch when I show them an online marketing proposal for a fraction the amount. That being said, more and more of my clients are pulling back from traditional marketing and focusing online. Just last week, one of my clients abandoned all his radio ads and is moving that budget to online marketing.
Matt Olah
hey this is a very interesting article!