Does online marketing really save your company a lot of money?

Nothing else is better than social media, like Facebook. Free advertising and millions of followers. Facebook ranks number 4(not sure) but highest population in the world in term of population.
Just few years ago, all the biggest luxury brands of the world was hesitate to be part of Facebook, they think it will hurt their prestige of Luxury. Now they are all in.
For magazine advertising is over, high cost and there are too many. Now the best to get the brand expose is the words of mouth, people chat, share and link. social media, blog are effective advertising globally.

I've been working in online marketing for over 12 years now and as Chris says, there's no question that online has to be an integral part of any marketing campaign in North America but there seems to be many challenges I've seen with this medium in VN specifically. Perhaps I'm wrong and someone here can correct me but here are the two big issues I see you need to resolve prior to going ahead with online marketing in your campaign. One caveat on the below, when I talk about online marketing, I do not mean online advertising, which frankly is little more than translating your offline campaign to a banner or landing page.

1. Is there executive buy in? And I don't mean that execs think you should do it simply because everyone is talking about it. Metrics from an online campaign are vastly different than that from a traditional impression and CPM's can be high at first (but this can rapidly balance itself out if you are doing it right) and your engagement metrics are going to be different than your impression. Without proper metrics & iteration you are leaving a lot of value at the table.

2. Do you have people who actually know online marketing? I can not count the times I've had conversations with "experts" who can't go beyond banner ads, SEO or a Facebook brand page. Yes, they all technically count but this is the tip of the iceberg. Online channels allow for a very unique opportunity to engage your community and without leveraging that, you may be better off doing what you are actually good at and know you can deliver on.

At EA, I used to have to fight tooth and nail for just a small single-digit percentage of the overall marketing spend. Over the years that started to change and now there are times when a smaller game launch will only spend on their online, social and community marketing. I see a lot of similarities with where VN is but there's a lot of educational & training catch up that still needs to happen. Exciting times!

Online Marketing is one of the marketing tools.

It just only suitable for some product only.

So, base on what product, online marketing will be more or less effective, then it will save costs to your company or not.

Answer to Ms. Tue Minh,
If you are not IT specialist, then you should do outsourcing for marketing online until cost of outsourcing is higher than you do by yourself.

Let me give you and example: My company currently collecting & Analysing around 10,000 people working as broker in Real Estate (name, e-mail, mobile phone,...), we did it online and finished in 5 working days with 02 people. In this case if you do manually, then you may spend, i think one month or more & cost you at least 10.000.000 VND (labour cost only). But if you do outsourcing by IT partner, then you save alot of time and money.

If you need more help, please contact me, I am online service provider.

KHOA

Thanks Dido! My concern is before going online, a company should invest in their online team (hire new staff, train current staff, etc.) and also invest in their own system which could be time consuming and eat up a large amount of money. So, is it really cost-saving?