I think most people consider online and offline/traditional marketing as two entirely separate entities.

Being a PPC Campaign Manager(ok, ok an Intern Campaign Manager!), I am obviously biased to the paid form of online marketing and believe its success far outweighs the results delivered by offline marketing simply because so many people are turning to the Internet to look for absolutely anything they desire... and will find it!

I recently read this article on ClickZ which sheds an interesting perspective on these two forms of marketing. Basically statistics are showing that the integration of online and offline marketing is achieving results far better than they can produce on their own. “According to a new study by Jupiter Research and search marketing agency iProspect, a surprising two-thirds of searchers are led to search on a given keyword as a result of offline marketing”.

I think it is essential for companies to integrate online and offline marketing strategies (and it is a shame that so many of them don’t); we are, after all, living in a technologically driven age where if you need to know anything all you need to do is conduct a search on the Web.
So what better way is there to find out if an advertisement (in a newspaper/magazine) is really advertising what it claims to be, by searching for it on the Internet? And what’s even better is that while offline ads are leading to searches on the web, online advertising is able to track what is or isn’t leading to purchases or sales and allow us to tweak the campaign at any time in order to achieve the results – not so easy for the offline marketing endeavours is it?

So for all those companies out there who have been weary of making the move to online advertising – it’s not one or the other anymore. By integrating the two you can achieve success… the results will speak for themselves.