Evolution has been and will always be a mammoth term to properly describe. Since the evolution of the digital age, the heavy changes have been brought in the marketing sector. The steep and sudden growth of digital marketing has surprised the business world and shook personal lives of people, by changing the trajectory of marketing along with the strategic thinking.
Today’s world has entered into the digital space, but in retrospect you would find that the history of digital marketing reared its head somewhere in the mid 80s. Furthermore, if we talk about the established truths and figures, there are right around 170 million active users who are using social media every day. In context to marketers, the vast majority of our potential customers are online and it has become a necessity for businesses to grow their online presence in this Internet world where everything is available. Let’s face it, regardless of what business you run, you’re going to need to market and promote your brand and this is much easier to do via online marketing than offline.
There has been a lot of change from the time when search engines came to the frontlines, from Yahoo to AltaVista making significant strides in the digital evolution of search. But let’s be honest, the golden years didn’t start until Google was launched in 1998. As technology advanced far and wide, there are many new things which have made our lives easy and comfortable.
All this changed until the big social media giants entered with a bang. No one realized it’s significance till the time Mark Zuckerberg and his Harvard roommates followed through with their ideas that transformed into a the giant, Facebook. It was the start of a new era for digital marketing. The social media that never sleeps has changed the way we communicate. Platforms like Facebook and Twitter have manifested the need to constantly broadcast our lives on the Internet. Twitter is most famous for this after becoming known for celebrities sharing what they ate that day or if they were tweeting from the bathroom. The need to share and be shared has grown immensely popular with the current generation.
With ecommerce entering into online marketing, ordering a pizza, buying a television, shopping online or filling the application form for admissions, everything can be done in a jiffy. But before the evolution of online marketing if you wanted to keep up with the news, you had to walk down to the newsstand when it opened in the morning and buy a local edition reporting on what had happened the previous day. Today a click or two is enough to read your local paper and any news source from anywhere in the world, updated till the last minute. We can send data from one end of the world to the other in a matter of seconds, make online presentations, share a memory with friends and use pictures, videos, sounds, and text to share our real lives. Personal stories go public; local issues become global.
Gradually touch screen and mobile technology paved the way for user-led experiences and the birth of apps that in turn unleashed new concepts in design, data capture, and targeted marketing to captive audiences. Downloadable music has completely replace the once-loved CDs. Similarly, the book business experienced literal transformation from print books to digital books. A few years ago, Amazon launched the ebook revolution, which has only made the change even more apparent.
The whole scenario of marketing has changed from TV ads, billboards or forecourt salesmen for advice on the best products or services to getting everything on Google. It’s nothing unexpected, as the power of digital marketing is unleashed, the uncertainties of printed marketing are coming to the fore; but businesses are leaning more towards the data-driven, versatile, traceable nature of digital and the demands that new innovations push upon organizations to market to their clients in the manners in which they wish to be showcased to.
