Many businesses are abandoning or cutting back on print advertising in favor of online advertising. There is some wisdom in this, although it’s important to take a close look at your personal business goals. For many small businesses, a marketing mix of both types of advertising is required in order to reach all potential customers.
Print advertising has largely gone by the wayside. Most people search online for products and services they require. Even if they don’t make a purchase online, they use the Internet to find local businesses that provide what they need. Few people actually look at print advertising these days, especially in newspapers that have nearly become obsolete.
However, there are some advantages to print advertising. There are some people out there that have not embraced the Internet as fully as most. If your target market includes people over the age of 50, chances are good that you have some potential customers looking for businesses like yours offline. This is why it may be important to maintain this type of advertising.
On the other hand, it is very difficult to gauge your reputation in the offline world. Often your only way of knowing how people see your business in the offline realm is to ask current and potential customers what they have heard, and why they have chosen or are considering your business. With online advertising, it is much easier to track online reputation.
Online advertising offers the most advantages. There are many more ways to advertise online, some of them much more cost-effective than print advertising. For example, you can easily use social media to promote your business and improve your reputation. If you do all of the work in-house, it really doesn’t cost anything at all to use social media, unless you opt for paid advertising on social media networks.
Another advantage is that you can easily track the success of your online advertising by measuring your online reputation. This can be done easily through tracking tools and services such as reputation management by Reputation.com. Online reputation management can be seen and measured unlike offline reputation. It can be tracked with numbers, traffic, reviews, and social media interaction.
In the end, you have to examine your business goals and target market to determine which marketing methods are going to provide results for your company. Many local small businesses use a combination of the two, with an emphasis on online marketing.
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