How to balance the budget between online and offline marketing ?

Staw,

I have never seen anything like what you're looking for.

The reason, I suppose, is because the best mix of promotion will depend upon your niche, your product audience (where are they to be found?), the product itself, and how it is to be delivered.

Every case will be unique. If I were faced with this dilemma, I would start with online (because is seems to be less expensive given the "reach" it has) and test and track results. Once you feel satisfied that you have sufficient data for online, then maybe try a little offline to see how it stacks up.

I say begin with online promotion because to do offline advertising seems to generally take more money, results are often difficult to track, and they are often slower to assess.

Good luck to you,

Steve

You don't want to hear this BUT you need to test!!! Only test small on different sources. Fact of the matter is everyone results will be different because they don't promote the same product as you. Test small to avoid losing your shirt and see what works.

Find out what your target demographic is and that will give you direction on where to advertise. Focus on your audience not so much the source.

Get in front of the people WANTING your service.

For the online marketing Google and YouTube good option to get better results and in offline marketing TV best option compare to newspaper. If your services is best then TV best option to promote your business quickly.

I've got a fair amount of experience with this, some of my businesses spend $12k+ in a given week on print advertising alone depending on what we're trying to do (we do weekend sales events and drive a lot of traffic to them).

A bunch of considerations:

1. In my experience online rarely if ever has the reach of traditional media, I can run a print ad with exposure to 60 000 people in a day (more or less depending on the market), I find in most local markets it's tough to match that kind of reach with online and get the immediate response given for example most local keywords might garner a couple thousand searches per month so PPC doesn't have the same value and SEO takes a lot more time. Does it cost more? Very tough to compare, my typical cost will be $1500 for a full page color ad, $750 for a half page color ad (again varies by market and publication some are lower, some are higher), we usually run sets of 3 ads to create repetition (we've tested and never gotten great results comparably with 1 or 2 ads and 4 tends to be overkill if there's a lot of urgency) what's the equivalent in online advertising? Sure you can pay say $100 for 100 000 impressions on something like Facebook but those impressions are no where near the same value as a full page print ad or 3, Facebook users tend to be more distracted, less engaged, the ads can't communicate as much, etc. Try comparing radio to online, again I can reach say 50 000 listeners in a day on radio in a way that beats a lot of traditional online advertising, it tends to be more captive, last time I advertised on radio I believe we were paying $75 per 30 second ad spot but we didn't have super high volume to drive the prices down, I think our whole campaign was $3000 or something, but I really don't think we could have necessarily achieved the same exposure with most online media...though there are exceptions. We had pretty good success with advertising on the front page of the newspaper company's website, cost we paid for that was I think $1000 and it resulted in a fair number of clicks so it can happen but I think rarely in most of the traditional IM approaches.

2. The cost you pay relative to the value/exposure is a bigger deal than almost anything else. I used to say foolishly "I don't believe in x type of advertising". With more experience I now say "I believe in all types of advertising at the right price for the right market with the right offer".

3. Testing and measuring is overrated in a lot of offline marketing. What I mean by this isn't that it's not valuable, but rather that it's EXTREMELY DIFFICULT. Here's the thing, let's talk newspaper since one of my companies runs at least 2 ads per week so I'm pretty familiar with it. You've got to ask not just about the medium, publication, or ad but also: was it the wrong day of the week/month, was it the wrong location in the paper, was it the number of exposures? There are a ton of variables and it's almost impossible to split test them or split test them all because each time you run a new test your variables will have changed so you can't pin the variables down the same way you can online. What I focus on trying to test as much as possible is getting digital tests of my offer (not necessarily the entire ad) with my target market to ensure it works and converts, split testing here if possible for example using email, then using digital as well as market research to determine as much as possible who my target market are to see how much I can hone in on them to get the best results. Even then you've still got to test the particular publications and you have to be prepared to invest to really find out.

4. The product obviously makes a big difference. I find generally either mass market products or relatively high value sales tend to work best, I have a hard time making money in traditional media selling a niche $30 product, when we're doing $1000 sales, or $50 sales with mass appeal we do the best but even so it's like anything you need a sales funnel to really convert them into something high value down the road.


Obviously, as much as possible test small, test on the highest probability marketing first, control as many variables as possible and if you've got something that's working spend money there until you've built it up then expand, I wouldn't go crazy getting into too many mediums. The best advice to getting solid profits is to really deeply understand your market and target as tightly as possible to minimize costs, then scale up when you've got cashflow and a strong funnel.

Hope that helps.

I appreciate all the answers i got here. Thanks you, now i have something to think on!