The Biggest Dif­fer­ences Be­tween On­line And Of­fline Marketing

On­line and of­fline mar­ket­ing may share the same prin­ci­ple, but they each re­quire dif­fer­ent ap­proaches and pro­duce dif­fer­ent results.

Re­ly­ing ex­clu­sively on one form is not re­ally an option.

Here are the three biggest dif­fer­ences be­tween the on­line and of­fline mar­ket­ing, so you can de­sign a more com­pre­hen­sive mar­ket­ing plan for your small business:

Reach

Nat­u­rally, an on­line mar­ket­ing cam­paign has the po­ten­tial to reach far more peo­ple than an of­fline cam­paign. With print, you are re­stricted by the lim­ited read­er­ship of the pub­li­ca­tion, and cam­paigns can’t go vi­ral like they can on­line. B2B com­pa­nies usu­ally en­joy more on­line suc­cess, but with B2C it varies.

Of­fline mar­ket­ing al­lows you to fo­cus on your ideal au­di­ence — peo­ple you know are al­ready likely to be in­ter­ested in your ser­vices or products.

The age bracket and pro­fes­sion of your tar­get au­di­ence come into play here, as you’ll need to work out whether on­line or of­fline is the best way to reach them.

Cost

For tra­di­tional mar­ket­ing to be a suc­cess, you typ­i­cally have to spend a sig­nif­i­cant amount more than you would on­line. Of­fline mar­ket­ing usu­ally com­bines print with ra­dio and tele­vi­sion ads — you’re pay­ing for vis­i­bil­ity, and you can eas­ily ex­ceed your bud­get chas­ing full-page ads and com­mer­cial spots in prime-time broadcasts.

On­line, you just need to pay for your do­main name and host­ing. Of course, you might want to get a web de­signer in, or in­vest in a few mar­ket­ing tools to make life eas­ier, but this will al­ways be cheaper than tra­di­tional ad­ver­tis­ing. You can cre­ate a vi­ral post with­out spend­ing any money at all, and the cov­er­age you’d get from that far ex­ceeds that of a suc­cess­ful ad­vert in the lo­cal paper.

Con­vert­ing to sales

If you have an on­line store, on­line mar­ket­ing is in­cred­i­bly im­por­tant. The eas­ier it is for your cus­tomers to see the ad and then pur­chase the prod­uct, the bet­ter. Of­fline, read­ers must make a de­ci­sion to search for your brand or visit your store, and al­though many might in­tend to, they don’t al­ways fol­low through.

On­line mar­ket­ing is in­fi­nitely bet­ter for in­ter­ac­tion, too. Boost­ing en­gage­ment can help boost vis­i­bil­ity, and word of mouth trav­els faster on­line than in the of­fline world. But, then again, of­fline ad­ver­tis­ing has a cer­tain pro­fes­sional charm to it that some cus­tomers will value highly — es­pe­cially those who are sus­pi­cious of on­line com­pa­nies or dis­trust­ful of the in­ter­net in general.

Es­sen­tially, a good mar­ket­ing cam­paign will in­te­grate print and on­line chan­nels in a unique mar­ket­ing mix. Us­ing both in con­junc­tion with each other can strengthen brand im­age, in­crease com­pany cred­i­bil­ity and make your busi­ness seem com­pe­tent, pro­fes­sional, and se­ri­ous about what they do.

Of­fline mar­ket­ing can work re­ally well as a way of prompt­ing peo­ple to find you on­line, too — in­clude hash­tags, hooks and on­line of­fers in your print ads, and you’ll drive traf­fic to your web­site and on­line store.

On­line and of­fline mar­ket­ing may be two dif­fer­ent things, but ul­ti­mately, they’re not that dis­sim­i­lar. Where one is weak, the other is strong, and so think­ing about the big­ger pic­ture when de­sign­ing your mar­ket­ing cam­paign is essential.

Don’t see them as two sep­a­rate things — they’re both dif­fer­ent halves of the same whole.

By Sam Wright

Sam Wright is a free­lance writer. He spe­cialises in small busi­ness, and is cur­rently work­ing for Brand Republic.