Online advertising spending overtakes print for the first time according to new study

In a study just released by eMarketer, online advertising is set to eclipse print (offline) advertising for the first time ever.

This study by eMarketing shows that online marketing will exceed offline marketing in 2012

This study by eMarketing shows that online marketing will exceed offline marketing in 2012

This makes me recall what Warren Buffett said: Price is what you pay; value is what you get. At the risk of annoyingly repeating myself, the return on investment (ROI) of  online marketing for our clients, has far surpassed that of offline for several years now. This is particularly true, if your marketing budget is less than £30,000 a year (and let’s face it – the majority of companies are in this boat!)

Online marketing trumps offline marketing: What you can do

We’ve been advising clients since 1997, and for most of those years, when someone asked us how to generate more leads, the answer, 7 times out of 10, was and still is, to improve your online marketing. While this advice was sometimes treated with suspicion (particularly in the cowboy days of the web back in the early 2000’s), we no longer get the question “should I get on the internet?” Now it’s “what else should I be doing online?”

For starters, if you’re looking to start, or deepen your online marketing programme, why not begin by taking a look at what generates more healthcare enquiries: SEO, PPC, or Social Marketing? Once you get a handle on the various types of online marketing opportunities and the expected return of each one, then you can deepen your online activities.

Find out what people are searching for by intelligently using Google’s keyword trending tools. It is amazing how many companies are doing Paid Search with Google Adwords, yet aren’t using Google’s incredible data to accurately target their ideal customers, or not thinking strategically about how to out-compete their rivals online, by thinking outside the box.

Take a look at your blogging programme. Companies that blog get 55% more web traffic. Because blogging can be time consuming, we consistently recommend this detailed 7-day action plan to create a year’s worth of medical web content that will put you on the right path to ranking higher than your competitors.

Changing trends in business are moving at an increasingly faster and faster pace, and as I was reminded this week by Seth Godin, “unfortunately, most people aren’t adapting fast enough to this change in the workplace.” This week’s study by eMarketer is another wake up call for us to refocus our marketing attention and budgets to the activities that will produce the most ROI in 2012.