Internet marketing competes with traditional marketing. Over the years, I have been operating websites on the front line, and I have a profound experience in this process.
Some people think that the online mode is light and efficient, while others insist that the offline mode is more practical and reliable.
There is no absolute good or bad for the two models. The key point lies in what stage the company is at and who its target customers are.
I started to get involved in website operations in 2018. I have worked on an industry website with a weight of 7, and I have also established and managed an offline promotion team. Today I will share and present the key points of difference and optional suggestions summarized in these practical experiences.
Price competition: flexible adjustments online, relatively fixed offline
Internet marketing does have a natural advantage in pricing.
The information is transparent, and users can compare the products or services of multiple companies after clicking on a few pages. If a company wants to retain customers, it must be competitive in terms of price.
On the website I once operated, for the same product, the price sold online can be 15% to 20% lower than in physical stores. This is because it eliminates the hard costs of store rent and middleman price differences.
First of all, online price adjustment has a high degree of flexibility. Then, a limited-time discount event will be launched today. Then, a full discount event will be launched tomorrow. Finally, just change the numbers in the background to take effect.
This is not the case with the traditional offline model. Once the labels are printed and the price list is presented, if you want to change the price, you have to go through layers of approval. When there are promotions, you have to prepare the goods in advance and decorate the store. As a result, the response speed is much slower.
However, I have to remind you that when launching a price war on the Internet, it is very easy to fall into a vicious competition. The final result is that no one can make a profit. This balance must be properly controlled.
Sales path: Direct sales model to upper-level distribution
A very typical model in traditional marketing is "manufacturer → general agent → provincial agent → city agent → store → consumer". The chain is long, there are many price increases, and the speed of payment is relatively slow.
I once helped a customer in the furniture industry to make a plan. This customer used offline channels. The ex-factory price of the product was 3,000 yuan. However, when it reached the hands of consumers, it became 8,000 yuan. There are five or six links in this process, and each link must obtain corresponding profits.
Moreover, online marketing can achieve the situation of direct shipment from the manufacturer, in a state of zero inventory, and no dealers. After the customer places the order, the shipment is carried out directly from the warehouse.
What I run is a small home appliance website, and the situation is like this; on the back end, it is connected with factory inventory; on the front end, it is responsible for display sales; the capital turnover cycle has been shortened from the original 90 days to 15 days.
Of course, the direct sales model has higher requirements for logistics and after-sales. Returns and exchanges must be borne by yourself, unlike traditional channels where you can leave these matters to dealers.
Promotion method: paid and free combination play
The promotion methods of online marketing are much richer than traditional marketing.
There are free channels, including forums, Tieba, Zhihu, and Xiaohongshu, which rely on content to attract precise users; there are also paid channels, including Baidu bidding, information flow advertising, and Douyin placement, and their budgets can be large or small.
When I was operating the website with a weight of 7, I mainly followed two ways to promote the development of the website: First, continuously update high-quality original content every day, so that search engines can bring natural traffic to the website for free; second, cooperate with Baidu promotion to conduct bidding operations for high-value keywords, and finally achieve an input-output ratio of 1:5.
Promoting traditional marketing is relatively limited. TV advertising is one way, newspapers are another way, outdoor big names are another way, and flyers are also another way. Among these methods, either the price is ridiculously high, or the effect is difficult to track.
Distributing 10,000 leaflets may only get two or three inquiries. In this case, it is better to spend 500 yuan on the headlines to deliver information flow, which is more practical.
User experience: online convenience versus offline reality
The biggest advantage of online marketing is that it breaks the limitations of time and space.
At two o'clock in the middle of the night, if you have the desire to shop, you can turn on your phone and place an order. There is no need to wait until the mall opens the next day to shop.
Among the websites I operate, there are a large number of office workers. They have no time to browse during the day, but when they are lying down at night, they complete the purchase decision by swiping their mobile phones.
But there is also something irreplaceable about traditional marketing—it’s visible and tangible.
When buying clothes, you can try them on, when buying furniture, you can feel the materials, and when buying fruits, you can smell the fragrance.
The middle-aged and elderly customers I know will definitely choose to go to a physical store when purchasing valuable items. They claim, "No matter how beautiful the pictures online are, they are not as reassuring as touching them with your own hands."
Therefore, many smart merchants are currently carrying out measures to integrate online and offline, guiding traffic to stores through online channels for experience, or allowing people to scan QR codes offline to complete ordering operations online. These two models complement each other.
Product range: Long tail pair of standard products
Online marketing can sell far more products than offline.
Traditional stores are limited by shelf space and can only display a few hundred of the best-selling products.
Thousands of inventory holding units with unified numbers can be displayed on the website. Those unpopular products, niche products, and customized products can all find buyers.
Once, I was responsible for running a hand tools website. Offline hardware stores would not carry so many models. However, online, dozens of drill bits of different specifications can be listed, and hundreds of orders can be sold every month.
On the contrary, traditional marketing still has advantages in the direction of mass fast-moving consumer goods. In the field of fresh food, it still has advantages for high-priced experience products.
Buying a bottle of water, buying a pound of meat, or getting a beauty treatment are all things that most people are used to doing nearby.
Both marketing models have their place.
Internet marketing is suitable for companies that pursue efficiency, have broad coverage, and can track data; as for traditional marketing, it is still stable and powerful in terms of building trust, in-depth experience, and instant gratification.
My suggestion is not to choose one from the other, but make a combination based on product features and customer habits.
If the target customers you are facing tend to be younger and their decision-making path is relatively short, then give priority to online promotion; if the unit price of the product is at a high level, and sales need to be promoted through experience and trust accumulation, then it will be safer to conduct business online and offline simultaneously.
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