Anybody who is even casually aware of how local business has evolved over the last few years knows that one of the most dramatic changes has been the way the internet has eroded traditional local media.
Traditional media have become splintered. Newspapers are losing readers and advertisers. Direct mail has become ineffective because of technology changes. Advertising in local magazines is over-priced because of high production costs and vigorous competition from the web.
And most important, the Yellow Pages are no longer the dominant force they once were because fewer and fewer people actually use them for a whole variety of reasons.
Environmental Concerns
Yellow Pages are definitely not green
So far we haven’t even mentioned the environmental concerns about traditional print-based advertising. Don’t get me wrong. I was involved in the print advertising and related businesses for more than 20 years, and I’m not suggesting all print advertising should be banned because of environmental concerns.
But let’s get real.
Every week we get a big bag of junk mail flyers thrown in our driveway. My wife dutifully retrieves the local newspaper that comes wrapped up in the junk fliers. But I would just as soon chuck the whole mess just out of principal.
And I’m sure I’m not the only one. More and more people are reacting negatively to such ridiculous waste.
Just think of the millions and millions of big yellow books spread across the country. How many people do you think already refuse to use these things because of their environmental impact? Millions I would think. And millions more in the
very near future. Assuming the Yellow Pages even survive that long.
Are traditional media effective?
All of this misses the main reason advertisers have ALWAYS had serious misgivings towards traditional advertising. There is usually no way to monitor its effectiveness!
In fact, many traditional media usually discourage effectiveness monitoring. The reason is pretty simple. They know how ineffective most of their products actually are.
Is web marketing effective?
Unfortunately the same can be said for many web marketing and advertising products.
I am sure you been bombarded with advertising “systems” that promise to put your ads on thousands of websites. The pitch sounds convincing until you realize that nobody ever looks at these ads because nobody ever goes to the websites where the ads are placed.
Web marketing scams like that are a dime a dozen. There are literally thousands of them.
But the difference with web marketing scams is that you can immediately see how ineffective they are. There are hundreds of simple, inexpensive ways of monitoring your website traffic (Google Analytics, for example), and they tell you exactly how much traffic you are getting, and where it is coming from.
The other difference beetween web marketing and traditional advertising is that it is easier to monitor the effectiveness of a web campaign. Of course an effective online campaign has to be done correctly. We will discuss this further in a future post.
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