Is Internet Marketing Cost-Effective?

If your business is operating on a tight budget, you may be looking for places to pare away unnecessary spending. And if you aren’t seeing results from your marketing strategy, your current methods may be on the chopping block. Getting rid of tactics and strategies that don’t show positive ROI is never a bad idea, but ultimately, every business needs some form of marketing in order to attract customers and generate revenue.
Many Internet marketers (ourselves included) are repeatedly asked the question, “Is Internet marketing cost-effective?” The answer is a definite YES! and here’s why.

1. Internet marketing is cheaper than traditional methods

In the early days of marketing, businesses depended on print ads, billboards, direct mail, radio spots and TV ads. And while these are marketing methods that can certainly work even in a digital age they come with a hefty price tag.

Printing, distributing, and paying for ad space are certainly not cheap. In fact, this post that breaks down the cost of advertising for each medium shows that they can be extremely expensive. But if you already have a website, starting to market online can be as simple as tweaking the elements on your site to improve your chances of ranking well in search engines, or doing SEO. Of course, there are costs associated with getting professional help with this, but that leads us into our next point.

2. Internet marketing has a higher ROI than traditional methods

If you choose to invest money in Internet marketing, you can be sure that it will be worth it. Internet marketing has a higher ROI than any traditional method, meaning that your marketing budget can take you much further online.

So why is marketing online so effective? To put it simply: targeting.
Consider how you select the recipients of your current methods. Do you place ads in local papers? Do you pay for billboard space? Do you broadcast ads on a local radio station? Now, think about the people who you reach with those marketing messages. It’s probably a wide variety but is all of them really interested? Probably not. With Internet marketing, you can target your marketing directly to customers who are already interested in and looking for your products and services. So instead of paying to reach people who just throw away your ads or change the station on their radio, you only reach those who are likely to become customers.

3. The Internet is where your customers are

In addition to its advanced targeting, another clear benefit to Internet marketing is that your customers are already there. 87% of Malaysians are Internet users, which means that you have the potential for reaching a vast amount of people. The Internet is where people spend their time, which means that if you want to reach them, you should be there, too.