Online marketing

Why use online marketing? The reasons are plentiful. If you can do it properly, it gives you the ability to spend your time, not your money, promoting your business. It gives you access to a much broader market than any other type of marketing. It allows you to gain competitive advantage over larger companies who would generally crush you before you begin – having the monetary advantage.

When you get down to it, online marketing not only gives you a level playing field with the big or bigger companies, it gives you an advantage.

Assume you develop a piece of great software and try to start a small company. If you are deemed to be a threat by the big software companies, what is going to happen? If you don’t get bought out, they are going to wipe you out. Since you have limited resources and little leverage with retailers, you are in trouble. Not on the web.

Online marketing is beautiful because it flattens the playing field for all players, big and small. The key is multiple channels, integration, online visibility, targeting and understanding. Regardless of how much money a dominant company in an industry throws at online marketing, they will never have an inherent advantage over you. They have no leverage, because there is nobody to buy off. The best they can do is buy advertisements, which most people don’t click.

However, if you connect with your customers through the channels they use, with the product they want, and integrate that with complete visibility on how they respond, you’ll have the same if not more of an advantage over any of your competitors world-wide. In no way would this ever be possible in the offline world unless you have a monstrous amount of cash.

In conclusion, the solution is online marketing. Integrate your marketing channels; monitor your email, mobile, SMS, online and multi-channel campaigns; and increase your online visibility through your client understanding. While larger companies inevitably have more money, you will have customer intelligence that will leave you laughing all the way to the bank.

Why use online marketing? That is the wrong question. The correct question is why aren’t you already?

By: Louise O'Conor