A lot of great answers in here already. I would argue that online leads are usually the highest quality and most scalable. If you want to understand why you should research direct response marketing and inbound marketing.
One involves you finding them, the other involves them finding you.
Just wanted to toss my $0.02 in.
Traditional real estate marketing contains:
Postcard mailers
Print newsletters
Radio and TV advertising
Billboards
Signage
Internet real estate marketing contains:
Eblasts
Social media
Blogs
Website
So I feel digital real estate marketing is best as today everything is digital and getting online. So in my opinion, internet real marketing is better than traditional one.
You can use the internet to do direct marketing. The same way you can place out bandit signs along the roadways, you can do the same thing on the internet with sites like craigslist, or you can run an adwords campaign. Adwords campaign will generate faster leads than direct mail, but the different is, leads are actually look for you. Personally i would always choose an adwords campaign where you can spend the same money that you would on labor, postage and supplies weekly, you can do well with the same type of budget marketing online. If you can afford to do both you can send out mailers and run adwords, but if you are on budget, you should try adwords and you can receive leads within hours of running a successful campaign. Mailers typically take a day or 2 to hit the targets, in that time you could have had 5-10 clicks on your website looking to for whatever it is that you are offering.
I agree that it depends on who you want to market too. Buyers tend to be actively looking and would go online to search. If you are looking for sellers, it can be best to find off-market deals. These are people who haven’t done all the work you need to do to “put the house on the market”.
The best way to find these people is out-bound marketing. Send direct mail to people who fit the criteria of motivated sellers.
The list is important - here are some examples:
We love our online marketing!
Facebook Ads have been our main lead source along with our FB Messenger Bot.
PPC does decent for us.
We try Craigslist but nothing so far from it.
We also love our birddogs and we use DealMachine so once our birddogs find a property and upload it DealMachine sends them a postcard with a photo of their house on it. Super nice and customized.
Online marketing is the best way these days. Everyone turns to the internet for answers now and you need to be there to give them the right one. Not to say you shouldn’t try other old fashion methods as well, many methods do still work it just depends on how much time and effort you are willing to put in for your leads.