How much does a website cost, compared to your annual marketing spend on traditional advertising?
The following will hopefully illustrate that you could possibly be focussing more on your website, without increasing your advertising budget, in-fact you may be able to reduce it.
Advertising in a Local Newspaper
The cost will vary on the size of the advert & the period it runs for. The graphic above shows the average costs of advertising in a local paper, e.g. £1100.00 for a full-page ad, £750.00 for a half-page & £350.00 for a quarter-page advert.
Based on a single insertion excluding VAT and professional advert design & artwork prices.
The second part shows the costs of running that same ad for a year (12 insertions).
To advertise your business; once a week, in 1 publication, for 1 year could cost you £6760.00, for an advert the size of a credit card.
Does traditional advertising work?
Your local paper will impress upon you that they have a large circulation let’s say 20,000. With an even greater readership of 60,000, this is based on the number of people who will read that copy in a household.
But of that readership, how many are going to be your Target Market?
Excluding certain demographics (depending on your products or services, say; non-adults, retired persons, non-working), your exposure drops. Of those that are your target market discount a further portion; who don’t notice the ad, aren’t interested at that time, etc. You are now left with those who show a degree of interest – Attentiveness, of those there may only be a small number who take action.
So for all that cost, you may have their attention for a few seconds, once in a week, when they aren’t looking for your services.
Traditional advertising has its benefits, essentially keeping your business and its services visible. But, is there a more effective way to improve your local & national business advertising?
If you’re looking for a product or service do you pick up the local paper & scour the adverts?
“No, I would use Google”, is the answer I would expect from the majority.
Website benefits vs Traditional Advertising
Your website design should be structured to take advantage of;
- its location for local business leads
- search engine position on organic search results, or via the sponsored links,
- actively & efficiently marketing your products and services.
With a content-managed website you can dynamically create targeted campaigns for specific services, create custom content & promotions, release press updates & product information, instantly now, can you do that with traditional advertising?
Also, your website is not set in stone, it can evolve with your business, actively targeting new customers, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. You can also monitor how effective it is, and make decisions based on that information.
So, the original question was how much does a website cost compared to traditional advertising? but, maybe it should be can my business afford to spend big on traditional advertising methods and overlook website investment. Which, is one of the more powerful tools you have for marketing your business?
So if you are looking to make more of your marketing budget and improve your business web site? Give me a call on 01323 419212 or drop me a line.