Online and offline marketing are both methods of marketing a business or brand. While both have their advantages, comparing their performance can help you decide which is the best method for your particular marketing campaign.
Here are some of the main statistics pertaining to online vs offline marketing.
Cost-Effectiveness
The main differentiator between online and offline marketing is the former’s cost-effectiveness. Simply put, online marketing is more cost-effective. This is because you can use various online tools and platforms to reach your audience (consumers or potential customers) without necessarily having to spend large amounts of money on traditional advertising methods.
To put it simply, in 2018, online marketing will cost you $2.04 whereas traditional offline marketing will cost you $23.31. So, as you might have guessed, the statistics say that online marketing is more cost-effective. Specifically, the digital marketer will have an average cost-per-acquisition (CPA) of $2.04 compared to an average cost of $23.31 for the marketing department.
Conversions
Conversions are quite simply the results of a marketing campaign. When you launch a marketing campaign, you normally have a benchmark against which you can measure the success of your campaign. In the case of online marketing, the benchmark is known as a conversion. A conversion can be defined as a completed sale or a lead that you’re able to convert into a sale.
To give you an idea of the difference in cost-effectiveness between the two types of marketing, let’s dive into the details. If you want to acquire 200 new leads for your business, you would need to spend $23,310 on traditional marketing methods. However, if you want to do the same with online marketing, you will need to allocate $2,040. In other words, online marketing will give you a better return on your investment (ROI).
Why? Well, let’s take a look. If you want to acquire 200 leads through traditional methods, you would need to invest in a newspaper ad, a magazine ad, a billboard, a radio ad, or a TV ad. Now, depending on the size of your budget, you might be able to get away with just a couple of those advertising methods. However, once you exceed that number, the returns get smaller and smaller. In other words, it’s becoming more and more expensive to attract customers.
With online marketing, you can simply set up a website and start attracting potential customers. Once you have those potential customers, you can continue to market to them through email marketing and social media. So, while online marketing is certainly not free, the cost-effectiveness makes it a clear winner compared to traditional offline marketing.
Impressions
Like conversions, impressions are also a measurement of the success of a marketing campaign. However, in the case of impressions, the benchmark is the number of times your ad is viewed by a potential customer or consumer. As you might expect, the cost of acquiring one impression is much lower than it is for a conversion. Specifically, a $150 online advertising campaign will get you a million impressions whereas it will cost you $15,600 to $50,000 to get a single conversion.
Why is this the case? Online advertising platforms (e.g., Google Ads) give you detailed statistics about the success of your campaign, allowing you to easily identify problem areas. For example, if you are paying per click and you don’t see any significant results, it could mean that the ad is not effective enough or that the market you’re targeting is not interested in your product or service.
In summary, online marketing is more cost-effective as it requires less investment and, as a result, gives you more immediate results. At the same time, while both online and offline marketing have their uses, the data presented above should make it clear that offline marketing normally provides a better return on your investment.