Where are your customers? Reading the morning newspaper while they eat breakfast? Not anymore - the newspaper business is dying. Well then, maybe they’re listening to radio? Forbes says no on that, too. OK, well then what about magazines or Television? Let’s add two more “no’s” to our list.
For over a decade, traditional media has either been stagnant in the case of broadcast radio, or dying altogether such as with newspapers. The audience just isn’t there anymore - they’re all online.
The reason everyone is online is because it’s less expensive to publish online & much faster to distribute your story (or podcast, videoblog, whatever) to the entire world that you could have done with traditional media.
It should be no surprise then that marketing has changed right along with mainstream mass-media. If digital is the best way to communicate online, why wouldn’t it be the best way to market as well?
In addition to audience size, online marketing also benefits from ease of tracking, which makes technologies like retargeting possible, and allows the easy analysis & rapid adjustment of marketing campaigns in a way never before possible.
It used to be that you launched a marketing campaign like the Queen Mary setting out to sea. Now, you can measure & track performance in real time, and adjust a thousand different parameters to optimize. That helps keep costs down for digital marketing, and obviously confers a competitive benefit to companies that focus on it.
The exceptions to this rule used to be for local marketing and advertising. Since the internet is global, it makes more sense to focus your ads locally. Even this is changing with venues like Google Business, Yelp, Citation Sites, and community-focused portals like NextDoor.
In real estate specifically, one of the largest upsets has been the transition from the local classifieds to Craigslist. In my area, every house listed on Zillow is also listed (and relisted multiple times) on Craigslist.
The advantages of online marketing have only gotten greater with mobile-marketing. Now you can reach your audience whenever and wherever they’re at - and depending on the platform you can tailor advertisements to their location in real time. Those are considerable advantages over traditional media.
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