It is rightly said that the only thing constant in this world is change, no matter how powerful or effective the impact of a thing or a person is, the time changes the situation.
Mobile replaced a lot of things like pager, calendar, codeless and many such things. Typewriters were replaced by computers and in the same manner, internet marketing is overtaking the market and getting popular along with conventional marketing.
But, there is one other saying as well, that every coin has two sides and so does this coin too. Internet Marketing is undoubtedly the future of the Marketing as on daily basis people are getting more and more obsessed with the virtual life. But still, there are a lot of potholes in this road of the future.
Yes, internet marketing is tremendously helpful but there are some limitations which still people and marketers need to overcome. Few of the factors are such that has still kept the conventional marketing more preferable and in demand.
Below are such 8 critical limitations of using internet marketing as your source of medium.
- Online Marketing as people allegedly say does not happen to be of free of cost, there are a lot of things that adds to the cost of internet marketing and they are not at all cheap. Some of the major expenses are the cost of hardware, software, wed site designing, online content and product distribution costs, maintenance of the site as well as server, web hosting of the website and the costliest thing is time, all of these must be considered while planning for Internet Marketing budget and strategies.
- Where conventional marketing helps in spreading awareness as well as selling, the internet is considered as a medium to gain information to most of the customers. There are still many industry and areas where internet marketing is incapable of generating a trust and sale of the product or the service. There are still lots of fields where people prefer the live interaction when they buy.
- Still, 50% of the world does not have access to the internet and there are many such areas where people are not even literate enough to access the internet. This is a major limitation for internet marketing in the current scenario.
- Cyber Crimes are increasing day by day as well as the scams. The rules if cyber security are still not that secure and that leaves a fear in the mind of the people and leaves internet marketing vulnerable.
- Internet marketing faces a major current as well as the future issue of “infollution” – the issue of distracting and old data on the internet. There are lots of websites that are decades old and no information is updated on it from a long time. If a customer relies on it and makes a decision, there is a high chance that it can lead to some trouble. This thing is not an issue in conventional marketing as people timely update things in the real world. Whereas there is no such filter available in the virtual world.
- One major issue and an important question is that “is your website safe?” In internet marketing it is very easy for competitors to attack your website and put in some hack in it, there are a lot of such examples where competitors tried and also succeeded in damaging the brand image via some online hack or negative attacks.
- One of the major reason why conventional marketing is not affected that much from Internet Marketing is good old fashioned customer service. The majority of online marketers fail to deliver ideal response programs as well as customer service. There are thousands of website live which has no customer care service and still are running. But, the word travels really fast in this virtual world and if a website fails to deliver desired customer service to even a single customer, there is a high possibility that the customers will spread out a negative word in the industry and news no matter genuine or fake, travels faster in the virtual world.
- One major benefit of Conventional marketing is that it is not that easy to imitate a conventional marketing move. It takes the time to do that and in the meanwhile, the initiative taker gets the benefit of risk. But, if we talk about internet marketing, there are a lot of instances where one successful strategy will be copied in less than 24 hours by your competitors. Thus, you fail to get the desired benefit.
Thus, the only motive of this article is that no matter how fond marketers are of the internet marketing, if they have not taken proper precautions and some help of an expert, there is a high possibility of getting a backlash or a complete failure and resulting into a waste of time as well as money.
Article By: Deval Darji is an industry expert and also a full-time Online Marketing Consultant at a Digital Marketing Agency- Nesterzweb. He has done some deep research in the field of Online Marketing. To get more tips, visit the website linked to Nesterzweb.
