Certainly, this world has grown fast and changes have been fast as well. From the traditional ways of doing things, people have become more advanced and when you want to keep up with the Jones’ you had better know what to do. Businesses that are slow get left behind. Businesses who are eager to reach the turret of success continue to search for higher degrees of learning so as not to lose in the game.

Who would not want to succeed in business anyway? Everybody wants to generate income; everybody wants to be known in his or her own field. But how is it possible to succeed, especially in the business world?

One Word – Strategy. That single word alone already means everything. It actually defines everything about success.

Today, people are hooked on the internet. Almost everybody knows how to “surf the web”. In fact, most businesses have already seen its potential that is why online marketing has also become a phenomenon.

You may be skeptical about this strategy because you still think that yellow page advertising is better but let us delve into the ten major reasons why online marketing is more effective than yellow page advertising.

Reason #1: You Save More Money

The life of any business is money. Without this, it will not run. That is why savvy businessmen are very skeptical when it comes to their expenses.

With yellow page advertising, you pay a huge amount. In fact, for every inch of space in the yellow pages, there is a corresponding price. Imagine how much it would cost you if you had a full page ad? In New York, Manhattan, each inch of space costs $2,500 while a whole page ad costs $92,000!

With online marketing, you just have to pay for your monthly website, your website design and marketing, which could be less than $100/month to keep your business’ online advertising up and going.

Reason #2: You Have More Space For Content

Space does count when it comes to advertising. If you want your customers to know more about your business, limited space won’t work. In online marketing, you have all the space you need to advertise and promote what you have. In yellow page advertising, you only have a very limited amount of space to work with.

Reason #3: More People Hear About You

Have you ever noticed that when you are surfing the internet, you always come across a lot of things and then you suddenly became interested in them? That’s what online marketing can do for your business. If you know how to optimize your site, then more people will know about you. Can you do this with yellow page advertising?

Reason #4: Online Marketing Is Measurable

Why is this important? With tracking, you always know what are the most commonly keywords used by your visitors and can you monitor everything. When you develop a list of your best keywords, you can generate more traffic to your site and you’ll definitely gain more buyers.

With your yellow page advertising, you’ll have no ideal what prompted a prospect to take action.

Reason #5: You Can Use Videos With Online Marketing

Advertising on television is very expensive right? With online marketing, you get to promote your products or services at a very affordable price and even show your business’ benefits and features through online video. This is more visible and reliable than yellow page advertising which is plain words and photos, right?

Reason #6: You Establish A Relationship With Your Customers

How can you establish a relationship through a yellow page advertisement? With online marketing, you have the chance to develop relationships by sending email tips or online newsletters to visitors who keep coming back to your site. You can also get better business ideas by allowing them to leave comments.

Reason #7: You Can Easily Build Trust And Credibility With Your Visitors

When using online marketing, you have the chance to express your desire to help your customers and not just benefit from them. When you are able to build rapport with them by simply giving them simple ideas for free, you will quickly earn their trust.

Reason #8: You Are The Only Choice

With yellow page advertising, there are a lot of advertisements under each category. If you are the reader and you have 500 choices to choose from, would you still continue? Instead, you’ll probably just hop on your internet and type the keyword of what you want and you’ll have it! That’s online marketing! If you know how to do it right, you will be the only choice of your buyers.

Reason #9: You Can Promote Your Business All Over The World

Can yellow page advertising reach the whole world? Certainly not. With online marketing, the World Wide Web will do the work for you. Your products and services will be known throughout the nations with just a click.

Reason #10: Online Marketing Is Eco-Friendly

Imagine how many trees are being cut down just to come up with yellow pages? Imagine how much waste is thrown out when people dump their yellow pages? With online marketing, you are at peace with the nature. You gain without hurting the ecosystem.

Amazing isn’t it? These ten are just some of the million reasons why you should choose online marketing over the yellow pages. You save money, you save effort, you save the environment, but more importantly you gain more wealth!

This is human behaviour, which is herd-like. As social creatures, what we do or don’t do is often based on what others are doing or not doing. People don’t really think about their actions. In fact, Mark Earls, a leading human behaviour and strategy expert, would argue that very often thinking comes after the fact – people act and process it later. He would also say that there’s not much point in asking people why they do what they do, because they don’t actually know.

Now, the trick is to harness the power of human behaviour to create successful business strategies and to build powerful brands. If you consider the power of crowd mentality in your strategies (which perhaps goes a little against conventional wisdom about how people make choices) you are virtually guaranteed to have a strategy that will succeed. Why? Simply because you will be able to develop strategies that work by understanding peoples’ behaviour.  You will understand how new ideas really catch on and are disseminated, and how to create momentum and longevity behind your strategic objectives – whatever these may be.

Considering people are the number one resource in business today, it’s surprising how little we consider the true nature of human beings within the scope of business strategy. A century ago, the main resource of a business was capital which bought the things a business needed to thrive such as land, materials, transport and so forth. Today though, up to 85% of the economy in developed countries is based on human interaction at a variety of levels.

This is why it’s important to understand human behaviour and to shape strategy around it – because people (staff, customers, suppliers and distributers etc) are an essential resource in today’s business world.

Mark Earls challenges strategists to really think about things. In an eBook entitled Understanding How Behaviour Shapes Strategy, he discusses his thinking on the subject of people and strategy. Thing is, our misconceptions about human behaviour and why people do things is what fundamentally undermines most strategies. A different view of people may just change the rules for forward-thinking businesses.

Earls contends that while Marketing attempts to shape mass behaviour, its attempts are poor. This is shown by the fact that most new products fail within the first year, and the ones that survive struggle to make any long-lasting or substantial impact on the consumers’ behaviour.  He goes on to say that the reason for this is perhaps that our interpretation of what causes human behaviour and how to shape it is wrong.

Earls says there are two views that are fundamentally flawed in our understanding of what shapes behaviour.  Firstly, we think that to change behaviour we need to change minds when in fact the opposite is true. The second mistake we make is thinking that ideas and behaviour spread through “the corridors of influence”, through ‘The Few’ when in fact it is ‘The Many’ that really make the difference.

When you consider the relationship between attitudes and behaviour, how new ideas and habits get formed and how to create the momentum that creates real and lasting change you will find that the best strategies take human behaviour into account. Strategies in fact only work if they change human behaviour.  Whether you are dealing with staff, customers, investors or others, you first have to understand how people work and how new ideas catch on to appreciate what makes for successful business strategies.

Why integrating online and offline marketing is essential for marketing success . . .

All brand managers unanimously agree that marketing is a must. But while they are constantly trying to overcome media clutter and find innovative advertising devices, they often commit a simple yet serious crime. If print, TVC, radio, OOH belongs to the realm of offline marketing, PPC, social media marketing, blogs, forums and articles form a distinct part of online marketing. What many people fail to realize is that a marriage of online and offline marketing plans is likely to produce far more effective results than either one alone.

This is at the core of the concept of 360 degree marketing that basically prioritizes multiple media marketing over one or two media. In other words, it may be better to put your eggs in many baskets when you are trying to reach out to the maximum number of consumers.

For brick and mortar businesses, the first obvious step to marketing online is to create an online identity in the form of a professionally designed, search engine optimized website. Not only does this help you reach out to far greater virtual visitors than possible with a physical store or office, it also is a more cost effective way to advertise services. Since most offline marketing media entail prohibitively expensive costs, it is best to use as little media space as possible to grab eyeballs and generate basic awareness. The offline advertisement must then contain a link to your website or more specifically, a specially created web landing page, where the audience can get greater details to satisfy the curiosity created by the offline ad.

Another very important aspect of online marketing is to not limit your presence to a website. There are multiple low-cost, pay for results models offered by various sites and affiliate marketers that can help spread the word about your business on the World Wide Web.

Going from offline to online methods is therefore relatively easy and economical. The reverse, however, is much harder making it very difficult for exclusive internet businesses to have a presence in the non-virtual world. This is particularly magnified in the case of pan-continent businesses where it is just not possible to have an offline presence without having targeted geographies. For such businesses, full exploitation of all possible internet marketing methods is a far safer bet.

Another great benefit of online marketing is the ability to evaluate various media comparatively to a very fine detail and then re-plan allocation of funds to the more ROI effective methods. There is a far more ambiguous link between advertising and sales in offline marketing methods.

In conclusion, online marketing is more suited to smaller companies that are starting up or have limited funds. With time though most businesses need to find a way to make their online and offline marketing models work in tandem for maximum benefits.