The Evolution of Digital Marketing
Do you remember the time when the Internet was still an idea? How did we communicate with friends and family from other places? How did we buy products from business owners? How did businesses promote their goods and services? Before the Internet, although we already had ways of communicating, doing business and the like, it was much harder back then. But thanks to the advent of computers and Internet technology, everything we used to do before is now more accessible. Let’s take a look at how far digital marketing has come.
Early beginnings
1990 was the year that people started using the term digital marketing. It was also the year when the first-ever search engine, Archie, started. In 1993, we saw the first web-ad banner that Internet users could click. The year after that was the launch of Yahoo! and the very first e-commerce transaction transpired in Netmarket. In 1997, we saw the launching of the first ever social media site, SixDegrees.com. After a year, Google came into the picture, and Yahoo! launched Yahoo! Search. SixDegrees.com did not last long, and in 2000 it shut down, and some small search engines fizzled out. The first ever mobile marketing pitch from Universal was launched in 2001. Throughout the years, more prominent sites and campaigns such as Facebook and YouTube got into everyone’s consciousness.
The rise of digital marketing companies
Being a business owner and not having the time or the knowledge to promote the business over the Internet, there is an alternative. A digital agency can do the job. A digital marketing company analyses the market of their client, and they devise marketing strategies that will help their client’s business be on top of the race. The digital marketing industry benefited a lot from the rapid development of the Internet. Digital marketing companies have more tools at their disposal.
Gone are the days when promoting a business required physical labour like handing out flyers and putting up signs to make customers aware of their offerings. These days, businesses need only to put up websites and offer their goods and services to their customers without breaking a sweat. They also get to reach a broader range of potential customers with the Internet, because it is global. When in the past you could only offer your wares to the people near your store, today even people from the other side of the world can enjoy your products. It is a far cry from past marketing practices when the Internet was not yet a reality.
In the coming years, with the rapid development in Internet technology, we can expect digital marketing to bring more businesses to the forefront. More and more businesses will pop up because of the ease of doing it even without operating a physical store. It will also be much cheaper to run a business because of the unlimited resources that the Internet has to offer. Let us all take advantage of the Internet and what it can do to help business owners succeed in their industries.
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