Marketing and Technology are inseparable. Numerous marketing technology vendors are there today, out of which more than half of the marketers expect their companies to increase investments in technology for promotion and expansion, every year.
But, it wasn’t always this way.
The history explains the explosive evolution in digital marketing technology and explores what all things fueled it.
The Way We Were: History of DM
Traditional marketing existed for many years before digital marketing was ever developed. Billboards, Radio, Newspapers were the only ways to promote the businesses. But, when the Internet became an integral part of everyone’s daily life, a need was felt to further expand the techniques to reach people quickly and effectively. And here’s where the Digital Marketing came into existence. With the evolution of the Internet over the last couple of decades, web marketing changed as well.
DM in the First Few Years
The initial digital marketing campaigns were carried out in the form of banner ads with the prime motive of getting traffic to a site. Unfortunately, these campaigns led to a lot problems and confusion that came to be known as the “Dot Com Boom.” With the initiation of the recovery measures, businesses began to search for effective ways to launch and maintain web marketing strategies. The companies began to use keywords in their sites which turned to search engine optimization – using appropriate codes to achieve a high rank in search engine results.
Do you know, in 1991, a network protocol called “Gopher” was introduced as the first network query and search tools?
Soon after the initiation of SEO, Google implemented some changes in their search engine and added AdWords and AdSense. Both of these aimed to analyze the content to dynamically display relevant advertisements by working with the queries entered in search engines. Although, Google was not the first to use targeted ads, but the algorithms to prioritize organic search results were developed by them.
Another big development in the digital marketing was behavioral marketing which aimed at understanding and acting according to the visitor’s interest. This was achieved by visitors leaving a site with a “
cookie” so that advertising networks could be aware of their browsing habits. Digital marketers still collect data every day and this has become an essential part of the e-commerce world.
Do you know, in 2004, the first Web 2.0 Conference was held at which a new direction for the Internet was mapped out, with an emphasis on user-generated content and openness of information?
DM after Web 2.0
The Web 2.0 greatly affected the Internet. It now changed from a one way street with passive audience to a two way street where users could interact with businesses, on sites and on social networks. In the early 2000s, numerous networks and social platforms like LinkedIn, and Facebook were developed which allowed users to connect and interact. These new developments gave rise to the social media strategies for SEO campaigns and for marketing particular products. Now, social networking sites like Facebook states offering a new way to target specific demographics of people.
Over the past 18 years, digital marketing has changed from a very simple method of marketing to throw a site in order to get lots of attention and links, to a very detailed marketing campaign that are carefully targeted at a specific group of people. It is important for SEO strategists and other digital marketing specialists to incorporate the use of elements like social media strategies,
Pay Per Click (PPC) campaigns and link building strategies to keep up with the rapid changes so that they can have an advantage in the trends of the future.
