In a world where 3.6 billion people use social media, we all have to wonder when it started? How did it get to where it is today? If you aren’t older than Google, then it’s time to jump into this time machine, and let’s go back 30 years ago!
Digital Marketing is the promotion of products or services over the internet or any other form of digital media. According to MailChimp, Digital Marketing is, “also called, online marketing is the promotion of brands to connect with potential customers using the internet and other forms of digital media.”
Advantages of Digital Marketing
With digital marketing being a prominent feature in our everyday lives, we are to believe that in the next few years, the traditional marketing platforms will completely disappear, leaving digital marketing to pave the new road. Unlike traditional marketing, digital marketing is much more affordable, but there are also many more advantages to using digital marketing. With everyone moving to iPads, phones, and computers, we are able to reach a broader audience in a shorter period of time– giving digital marketers dominance in the marketing world.
The world we live in now is quite different from the world we lived in 30 years ago. Digital Marketing wasn’t a concept until the 1990’s when the development of the internet and the Web 1.0 platform — although, Web 1.0 was not able to share the research found on the internet, yet. Marketers were unsure of how they could use this to their advantage due to the internet not being widespread.
Fast forward 3-4 years later, a clickable banner flourished in this new world, shortly after Hot-wired purchased a couple banners for their ads. 1994 was the year of evolution in the digital marketing world. Because of the first few banners going live this began the transition process of digital marketing. This same year, Yahoo was launched.
Four years later, Google was launched, Microsoft launched their MSN search engine, and Yahoo brought in Yahoo Web Search. Within the next few years, the internet was a competitive market, a dog-eat-dog world. In 2006, the digital world developed to almost 6.4 billion in search traffic, in only one month. Microsoft quickly re-evaluated and left MSN on the back-burner to develop Live Search to challenge Google and Yahoo.
Web 2.0
Can you guess what is next? You got it, Web. 2.0. Web 2.0 helped consumers transition from being passive users to active participants. Within 2004, marketers were able to bring in $2.9 billion because users were now able to communicate with businesses. Shortly after this explosion in the early 2000’s, social media started to show it’s head with MySpace— keep in mind, this MySpace that is linked, is not the MySpace we all loved and enjoyed in the early 2000’s. At that point, we all thought we were going into coding. Soon after that, Facebook was born.
With the birth of these social media sites so early on into the development of the internet, businesses quickly caught on. These sites were able to help businesses promote themselves directly to the consumers based on what they are searching for on their own desk tops. New resources meant new approaches as to how to promote their brands while optimizing the social media network.
Being that we are in the big races now, businesses could not afford to be left behind. The digital market is constantly changing and a digital marketing professional is in charge of finding new ways to evolve with this change. With products that are digitally marketed, they are available to consumers at all times. With the average consumer spending about 145 minutes on social media a day, that gives businesses like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, etc to create marketplaces for consumers to shop.
Get in contact with us today! In the meantime, check out our 6 Secrets to Digital Marketing!
CEO | Brand Champion
Michael Doyle has been changing the face of Brand Marketing for over two decades. He built a tech-based advertising agency, DNA Advertising, into a multi-million dollar company. Michael sold the company as part of a national IPO in 2000. Michael founded Brand Iron in 2002 and has since lent his expertise to hundreds of other businesses in dozens of industries around the world.
