t2.ie Blog

Within the current economic climate it is more important than ever that you get value for money for any of your company’s marketing activities. Traditional methods would include print advertisements such as those placed in local and national press or flyer and brochure drops. According to the latest statistics from the internet World Stats website there are over 2 million internet users in Ireland accounting for just under 50% of the population…these stats speak for themselves and inevitably leans towards the opinion that more and more advertising should be carried out online.

Print Advertising

- For a one page advertisement for one publication (in a local national paper) it would cost approximately €1,800 plus VAT, not cheap if you intend running it a number of times.

- In order for an advertisement to have any impact on its target audience it would need to run for a number of weeks, affording this amount of media coverage will prove extremely costly without any guarantee of a return.

- Print advertisements are static. They cannot encourage interaction which may lead to the overall message being mis understood.

- Another noted disadvantage is not knowing if your advertisement ever even reached it’s target market. Readership and distribution figures only tell you the volume of readers not whether the amount of people viewed your advertisement.

Web Advertising

- Unlike a static print advertisement a webpage can offer customer interaction and real time solutions. Queries can be sent via the website in relation to the products or services being advertised.

- Unlike print, web based advertisement is always available 24 hours a day 7 days a week 365 days a year!!!

- Audience of over 1 Billion

- No distribution or printing fees

- Can be easily updated and changed incurring only small charges.

There are obvious advantages of using your website to advertise your products and services versus relying on print media. Web advertising is cheaper in the long run and offers the freedom to change the content of your message at a fraction of the cost. But the major advantage in my opinion of web advertising is being able to view demographically where the majority of your hits are coming from. This would allow a business to concentrate on a main area of the market where their products or services are in demand.

At a cost of a full page advertisement in a local or national paper a business could have developed a well marketed website which would be working for you 24 hours a day 7 days a week!!!

Let me know what you think…

Rosemary