You will see that several people have different views regarding online business and traditional business practices. Few of them will support online business saying it is more convenient while a few others may say traditional business is safer. There seems to be a continual debate on the rise of online marketing and how it has turned traditional business practices declining power.
However, the rise of online business did not happen overnight. It has come a long way and requires a strategic marketing plan that will help you to reach to a larger audience beyond the local demographics and geo limits. Simply relying on traditional marketing practices and designing the best website is not enough.
Gone are those days when prospective customers visited a store to buy a product they chanced upon in the yellow pages or inexplicably remembered one of the TV adverts. At that time traditional marketing practices included featuring in:
- The Yellow Pages
- Different expensive TV and radio adverts
- Newspaper Ads
- Coveted magazines and journals
- Flyers
- Banners
- Billboards and hoardings
- Different signage on vehicles and others.
All these practices were productive in those days but also cost a lot of money for the business. Depending on the means and methods, there were several factors to consider such as:
- Finding the perfect spot to put up the billboards
- Considering the circulation of the newspapers and magazines
- Choosing the right and the most opportune moment to put up an ad and much more.
In addition to that businesses also had to spend thousands of dollars deepening on the size of the company to make ‘cold calls’ to potential clients. This cold call concept itself is very irritating for the potential customers and sends down shivers down the spine for the business owners. This is because:
- You have to negotiate for an extra 5 seconds or so of the time of your customers and yours and
- Most of the time they will cut your call even before that resulting in any chances of selling your product off, forever.
With all these concerns and lacunas, these times and this type of marketing process was very gloomy, especially for the small businesses and marketers. They found that traditional marketing techniques were:
- Time-consuming
- Inconvenient
- Very expensive and most importantly
- Had no assured results.
An online business cannot rely on these techniques and therefore have to look for other alternatives. Before the online business boom in the 2000s, traditional marketing was a status quo and just ‘marketing’. It was the most viable and available way for all businesses to sell themselves.
However, times, as well as the requirements and customers’ demands, have changed. Now you will find people looking for all types of info, study related topics, research papers, and entertainment news, and even reviews and debt settlement ratings online. The rise of mobile devices has made it even easier for them to access the internet. This has resulted in the decline of the power of traditional marketing due to several reasons.
- There is a significant fall in the newspaper sales pushing it to the verge of collapsing. A recent study shows that there has been a huge and amazing 42.84% decrease in the sales of newspapers.
- TV advertising is not doing much better either even after spending thousands of dollars for airing a 30-second ad.
Therefore, for an online business, you will need to depend on the most powerful and predominant platform – the Internet.
Rise of internet
It all started as a small network for US colleges to share information and data. Now it has exploded to become the all-inclusive source of information and communication. Internet, therefore, is the most useful way to create an ever-growing presence in your lives and is useful for individuals and most importantly for the online businesses.
This is an important marketing medium for any type of product or service that is sold online because according to studies, the first thing almost 80% of people do is visit the web to search for a product and read the reviews before making their buying decision.
Therefore, you will need to make use of online marketing most effectively, strategically and professionally so that you do not miss out on a huge chunk of potential customers. For this, you will need to follow much more than the traditional marketing practices of the past which are quickly declining.
Areas to focus on
The success of an online business lies majorly on web traffic, meaning the number of people visiting the official website. To ensure this you will need to follow specific steps and focus on specific areas.
Search Engine Optimization SEO is the buzzword for online business success and rightly so. This is the most useful and powerful technique to reach out to more and more traffic that will raise your conversion and hence your sales. The concept is quite simple where search engines such as Google, Bing, Yahoo, and others find your website and rank the contents that include texts, images, videos, and graphics. So build a b2b content marketing strategy that helps you to develop a route to reach your goals. This is done based on different parameters and factors such as:
- The relevance of the content
- The usefulness of the info it contains
- The structure of the website
- The loading time of the sire
- The responsiveness and
- The number and quality of inbound or internal links.
A professional SEO company will help you to meet with all these requirements of the search engines and ensure that your site appears higher up in Search Engine Result Pages.
Use of social media
No online business now can survive without using or integrating social media in their marketing techniques. There are billions of active users and followers using different social media channels such as:
- Linkedin and
- Google+.
If you can simply utilize your presence on these sites it will help you to interact with followers directly which will, in turn, have a huge positive impact on your web traffic. This will help you to secure the future of your online business with better results achieved now.
