Digital marketing has become a very important element in today’s society, where businesses find it hard to strive without promoting themselves online. Over the past few years it has taken the internet by storm, and today Digital marketing is only continuing to bloom with a vast variety of platforms which have allowed their owners and partners to invest into digital marketing increasingly. We live in a world where almost 170 million people wake up every day to Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat and whatnot. Regularly where online shopping has become a must, especially in the age of the Covid virus, people are consuming more social media than they have ever before. As an obvious deduction very soon, the traditional marketing platforms will have to move over, and digital marketing will be completely taking over. There are many advantages of digital marketing, a prominent one being that it is far more affordable and others is that you can reach a larger audience in a short amount of time. Due to consumers being hooked to their Tablets, phones and laptops in these areas, digital marketers have covered the most ground. Although some technological advances have been beneficial for the consumers but not the traditional marketing agencies and departments. Digital marketing isn’t always easy, and it usually puts the owners in a tight spot as they feel not many options are available to them. In this article, we will furthermore discuss the evolution of digital marketing and how it has influenced today’s society and marketing technology which was used in the past decade. Almost every professional is familiar with the principles of digital marketing. In the simplest of words, Digital Marketing is promoting any product through the internet on any sort of social media.

In simple terms, Digital Marketing is the promotion of products over the internet or any form of electronic media. The Digital Marketing institute stated that any use of Digital channels to market or promote products for specific customers or businesses is called Digital Marketing.

HOW DID WE GET HERE?

Well it wasn’t quick nor easy, and it took years of getting used to the base of it all, the internet. In the early 1990s was when the term Digital Marketing was heard for the first time. It was the start of the internet and the beginning of the digital age taking off the development of the Web 1.0 platform.

This platform was very unlike what we see today, it was simple yet effective with the help of this you could find information on the web but it did not allow users to share information. During this period no one was very sure if this new element of society, the internet which would later grow to be man’s best friend but for now this internet had seen no widespread deployment.

In 1933 we saw something rather unique, it was the first clickable banner, and HotWired soon purchased it, this was a mark of an important event as we slowly transitioned into the digital era of marketing.

The year 1994 brought much excitement with it as Yahoo was launched. It’s founder Jerry Yang revealed that the search web had received about a million hits just within its first year. This was an unnatural milestone which set about a change prompting wholesale change within the marketing space making companies put it on the tip of their list to build more efficient search engines and so the race began. Companies, bots, search engines started popping up with tools like Hotbot, LooksMart and the ever familiar Alexa. Real history was made in 1998 when we saw the coming of Google, who was destined to take charge of all search engines and somehow be the best. Then came Microsoft with the MSN search engine and not too long later was Yahoo now with it’s Yahoo search web. In this race, all the less significant engines were forgotten or simply wiped out, and the Giants took over for some real business.

The world of Digital Marketing only seemed to grow since then and hit it’s first high surge in online traffic when the search engine traffic was said to be 6.4 billion in only a single month. The competition was higher than ever, and Microsoft was not one to get jaded and put MSN behind and immediately launched Live Search to compete against the likes of Google and Yahoo. Web 2.0 was a revolution as now people could actively participate on the internet. This allowed users to interact with anyone and everyone. With Yahoo! launching the first-ever internet transaction, this was yet another milestone reached, and by April 1996, Yahoo had become the must-visit site for web users about the year 1998. Although Amazon had launched somewhere around 1994 it didn’t pick up the heat till the late 90s it was becoming a fast-growing phenomenon with eBay launching just a year after its predecessor. Email picked up the pace and had been accepted to use widely, and even though it is one of the most used digital marketing techniques even in the modern era.

The launch of Google was just a glimpse of what the age of technology had in store for us as the year 1998 holds a lot of significance in terms of digital marketing. Google registered it as the domain name on September 15th in 1997. By this time, the internet had become a money-making machine utilized by digital marketers and by 2004 just by advertising and marketing; around 2.9 billion dollars were being made just in the U.S alone.

Digital marketing in the 2000s:

In the early 2000s, the internet expanded and every company seemed set to mark it’s the domain. Linkedin had launches in 2002 which was only the beginning for this site as it made it’s spot in users daily lives and is still a very recommended site to this day as they must have done something right. We saw WordPress and Myspace mania which were at one point in time the most used sites. Although the spotlight for Myspace did not acquire a spot for the 2010s and it the flame burned out soon. In 2005, it was the most visited site on social media platforms with somewhere about 75.9 million users. Facebook was Myspace’s competition, and it was not up to the market, whereas Facebook became a worldwide phenomenon, Myspace was soon forgotten. Dicing them with the era of Facebook following the launch of Instagram, Snapchat, Pinterest, Twitter we only were witnessing the build-up of the current era of 2010s dominating apps. The 2000s were prolific but 2010s the setting of influential platforms. The mass usage only grew with time and has now become impossible to ignore. The build-up of Facebook started in 2006, and since then it has grown rapidly supporting businesses, influential pages and TV personalities and whatnot. Companies prefer to promote themselves where we witness how digital marketing has involved since. Recorded in 2007 there were about 100,000 pages where companies expanded their businesses. The 2000s were nothing less in participation in the evolution of digital marketing where we adhere to the most prominent and important platform of digital marketing which is Google and Google Ads right side by side to Facebook with the Facebook Ads.

From nothing to high tech Smartphones!

The launch of the smartphone was just the beginning of a worldwide phenomenon. Its popularity and demand is unbelievable now one can only imagine what it was like on the release of Apple’s first-ever iPhone in 2007. The iPhone show and flex is one all too familiar now, but how did it ever get here? Well, it started in 2007. Almost 3.5 billion human beings are said to use smartphones, and this is a habit that isn’t going anywhere any time soon. Smartphones are the biggest source of income these days and the ways to earn money just keep expanding. Smartphones are the main focus now when it comes to marketing; it has become all about grabbing the users attention and keeping them hooked to the screen. It is safe to say the most prolific year was 2007 when Steve Jobs revealed the very first iPhone it was all a cakewalk since then and just like that today we have seen 21 iPhones it has been revolutionary. With every iPhone since 2007, it has (debated after 2017) only got better with each year more and more refined specs. The base of all digital marketing revolves around a smartphone, so the invention of smartphones was the biggest win for our digital marketers. With the estimated usage of 5 billion cell phone owners, almost 2.5 billion own a smartphone, it truly is a win-win situation.

In conclusion:

Over the previous decades, advertising has needed to keep up and fight with jumps in innovation and our connection to it from that point onward. While the Sales Era saw the innovation of the phone, quickly followed by the television of TV and the Marketing Department Era.

While the internet has changed everything, it is worth remembering that the old forms of marketing still carry weight. Despite the growth in digital marketing, TV still takes a third of ad spend in the US and continues to grow, albeit at a slower rate. Embracing digital trends does not mean discarding traditional marketing methods. Keep up with the trends while integrating the old for solid marketing success.