If you are planing to start a business, you probably would have thought about your marketing approach, audience reach, advertisement cost and certain other marketing strategies to help you start. Now you must be thinking, what would be better for my product or service? Starting an online business or an offline business?

Today, a world without online businesses is hard to imagine. While customers experience the conveniences of buying online, lakhs of Indian sellers enjoy the convenience of selling online. Starting an offline business or a business with a physical location might look like a pretty huge deal, there are many problems you would face with offline business that you wont with online business. Lets understand the problems you wont face starting an online business.

1. Limited Audience Reach.

Marketing online helps you target the audience across the globe. Promoting your brand across diffrent platforms increases your brands awareness. It helps your target audience find you from around the world, whereas it is pretty difficult to advertise an offline business on a large scale. Also, online marketing lets you control the audience reach and target only your desired audience. It is difficult to control the  audience reach while promoting an offline business.

2. No Performance Tracking.

Advertisements in an offline business can be only done through traditional mediums like newspapers, television, radio,etc. It is impossible to track the performance of advertisements on traditional channels. While running an online business, Digital marketing lets you easily track the performance of your ads. You can easily get the data on people seeing your ads, clicking on your ads and even track conversions through your ads.

3. Accessibility Limitations.

In an online business, it will be easier for your customers to contact you through your websites. This is mostly missing from the offline businesses. The only way for the customers to access an offline business is by travelling to its physical location, which is quite troublesome. Online businesses can provide a lots of means to its customers for contacting them. This helps in maintaining better customer relations.

4. Higher Marketing Costs.

Advertising on traditional channels like television and newspapers is very costly. Offline businesses often find themselves spending more on advertisements than the revenue they get through them. On the other hand, advertising online is pretty cheap and has a higher reach than traditional channels.

5. Time Constraint.

One of the most commom problem that an offline business faces is the time constraint. A physical location cannot be functional 24/7. And even if it does, it will double the number of employee’s because humans need sleep, obviously. This will eventually result in higher costs. If you start an online business, your business will be up and running while you are sleeping. There will be no limitation of opening and closing shop.

Conclusion

The online market is providing lots of benefits to buyers and sellers. Business can now be done while sitting at the comforts of your home. With this growing digital world, it has become easier for businesses to sell online and customers to buy online. While traditional or offline businesses still hold a key place in the market, they are still limited in geographical terms. This last decade has seen a huge shift of businesses from offline to online marketplaces and its still growing.

About the Author

Amol Ghodke is one of the requested consultant in the dairy industry. Since the last 15 years, he has been actively involved in different facets of dairy business such as rendering training, effective branding, potential sales, marketing, etc. for top organizations such as Topfoods-(S.A), Marmum Dairy Farm (Dubai), Awesome Dairy (Mumbai), Sri Surabhi Dairy etc to name a few.