Advertising Online - faster, cheaper, broader

by Jay Machain

Cost effectiveness, range and tracking– three reasons why online advertising is giving traditional advertising a run for its money.

The internet has quickly become an all-in-one resource for entertainment, news, socializing, and research. This has created a rapidly growing market for online advertising and businesses big and small are getting involved. In the real estate industry change happens fast – by the time you wait for a traditional piece to be printed and distributed someone else could have a similar piece out to the public via the web days earlier and beat you to the punch.

Another benefit is that internet is a world-wide net. Parts of the market you had to ignore in the past can now be reached instantly with the same advertisement. Pockets of your target audience can all be targeted at once, rather than trying to find different publications, radio and television outlets in those regions.

In addition, think of the overhead costs in paper, printing, production, shipping, etc. The real message is in the design and knowing how to design for the right media. Part of this process is tracking: getting an idea of how many people see the advertising. While it’s very hard to get hard numbers tracking traditional advertising, digital monitoring and databases on the internet it’s possible to see how many people see the ad and how many visits their web site gets from it. Spending time and money to have a great web site is great, but if no one is seeing it, what’s the point?

By no means am I suggesting you turn a blind eye to traditional venues, rather that you rethink your strategy to get the best ROI.