Offline effects of online advertising

The Harvard Business Review July published an article, "Offline effect of online advertising," Magid Abraham, the CEO of Maggid Abraham, the Internet traffic analytics company. His basic point of view is: "In most cases, online advertising also stimulates offline sales, and online advertising pushes retail sales more than they do online." Companies should be bolder in increasing the input of online advertising. ”

Internet advertising has experienced banner ads in newspapers and magazines, rich media ads for TV ads, search engine keyword ads, interactive marketing campaigns and social marketing (community, blog, SNS). Banner display ads are accepted because they are close to traditional ads, and keywords are accepted because of the ease of quantification. Maggid Abraham's article, though short, revealed very few data messages, but clarified several crucial relationships: online advertising vs Offline sales, display ads vs. search keywords. The following are the data and conclusions of his article:

"We have recently conducted a market survey of a retailer with a yearly income of more than 15 billion dollars, and the findings are noteworthy," he said. Most of the company's revenue comes from its physical stores. But it recently launched a holiday online search and display advertising campaign on the internet to promote the company. We followed the people who had browsed the ads and found that in three months the group had increased online purchases of the company's products by 40%, while offline purchases had grown by 50% per cent. Since the company's physical stores have a much larger sales base than online sales, the revenue from the growth in offline sales is far beyond what the growth rate has been able to reveal. The results of most of our cases show that online advertising, even in terms of net growth rates, has a greater role in promoting offline sales than online sales.

"Online search advertising is often easier to attract people to spend than display ads." However, search advertising is often because the Internet is interested in a topic, and the implementation of a search before the appearance of the cost per display than the display of advertising. As with other types of advertising, the use of search and display advertising in a single marketing campaign to promote sales is better than the combined effect of two ads in two marketing campaigns. ”

In a word, China's internet market is more receptive to integrated marketing than banner advertising, in part because of the lack of quantitative (and even quantitative) results, and "integrated marketing" often integrates many resources as a cover for lack of quantification. This is actually an opportunity in the integration of marketing to scale, opportunities in the effectiveness of quantification. To quantify, can integrate into the old system of quantification is relatively easy to succeed, relatively easy to accept, such as TV ads in the audience, the type of outdoor advertising LCD screen.

Maggid Abraham has a little bias, in this essay, he actually believes that the goal of advertising is to increase sales, I am afraid many advertisers do not agree with this view, the other end of the advertising is to build brand image, as well as brand crowd positioning. The recent trend towards branding and consumption has been very interesting, rereading "luxury is in Vogue" (Trading up), "What Customers really Want" (treasure Hunt) and three books of "The affluent Volkswagen", "illusion, not quality: the shift of luxury to the global mass market" This article is a similar analysis from the perspective of high-end luxury goods.

However, China's market is not the same, learning the Western model alone is unlikely to succeed. The Chinese market, once a poor market, is now divided into a huge diversified market, and another trend is that domestic demand is increasing, and diversification and domestic demand may be the key words for the future decade of the Chinese market. In this pluralistic and domestic demand increase process, the Internet has the opportunity, can also say that internet marketing has the opportunity.

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RELATED links:
Offline effects of online advertising, Harvard Business Review, July 2008
Illusion, not quality: the transition of luxury goods to the global mass market