Today, there are about 3.5 billion users on social media platforms, which amounts to 45% of the entire population as per the 2019 survey of Emarsys.
It is thus, vital for all professionals to familiarize themselves with digital marketing principles.
Digital marketing promotes products or services on the internet using digital channels, targetting the target audience and businesses.
Digital marketing is becoming more prominent due to the increasing accessibility to internet services across the globe, in turn, causing an increase in the number of social media users and time spent daily. This progress signifies that digital marketing will replace traditional marketing platforms in the near future.
3 Prime Benefits Of Digital Marketing
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It reaches a massive audience in a brief time.
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It makes businesses reach the fingertips of their target audience that spend most of their time on tablets and mobile phones.
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It is more affordable than conventional marketing tactics, aiding SMB's to create their niche.
How It All Started?
The terminology "Digital Marketing" came in use in the 1990s.
Although it took off in the internet age and Web 1.0 platform development, users can search for the information they want, although they can't share data.
Until then, the marketers were not sure of how to use their solutions, as there was no extensive internet deployment.
The marketing in the digital space began when HotWired bought a few banner ads for advertising after the first clickable banner was live in 1993.
In 1994, Yahoo was launched and also around the same time Jerry Yang's "Jerry's Guide to the World Wide Web" got about 1 million hits in the 1st year.
Such attention attracted a lot of changes in the digital marketing sector. Companies started altering their site to climb up the ranking system of the search engine.
Then, Google was launched in 1998. Similar search engine giants like MSN came into the market in the third quarter of the same year.
Within two years these giant search engines wiped out the other small search engines.
Digital marketing had its first abrupt increase in 2006 when the search engine traffic had grown to 6.4 billion in a month.
MSN was put on the backburner by Microsoft to launch a live search to contend with Yahoo & Google.
Later, Web 2.0 was born allowing people to contribute as active users, and interact with other users and businesses.
Digital marketers used information flow volumes that increasing manifolds, resulting in revenue of $2.9 billion in the U.S. alone in 2004.
Below is the image depicting the overall journey of digital marketing:
Rise Of Social Networking
The social media platforms emerged with MySpace. Thereon, it accelerated and more networking platforms rose.
Facebook, the current social media giant, soon emerged after MySpace.
These companies took the opportunity without taking long to realize that it was a new space to advertise their services and products.
It was a fresh chapter in the digital marketing space as it became new reinforcements to promote brands and capitalize on them. Cookies also were additional enables to digital marketers. The advertisers began for other alternatives to profit from promising technologies.
Soon there was a technique to track general browsing habits and use the patterns of regular users to personalized campaigns for engagement.
Primarily, the cookie was created to register user-habits, although it changed with time and today cookies collect real-time user data.
As per the statistics of Marketingtechblog for 2014, social media posts are the top activities online in the U.S.
The digital market is always in a state of continuous change. A professional in Digital Marketing needs to discover ways to keep up with this constant change.
They always need to stay alert for emerging trends and work in the development of new Search Engine Algorithms.
Below is the timeline of social media platforms:
Future Of Digital Marketing
Digital marketing has been adapting from banners to big data in order to fulfil the consumer and brand requirements.
Today, things are changing at a faster pace with digital marketing connectivity and infrastructure.
Soon there will be exciting developments in conventional digital marketing spaces like social media, SEO, and content marketing with the help of innovative technologies and their applications.
As per Emarketer, 86.2% of all the digital display advertisements will be purchased through automated channels by 2020.
Also, voice search will become an essential aspect of SEO. As per Clutch, 70% of people are already using voice search through Google assistant.
Furthermore, as we already know, personalization connects with users way better, and videos engage consumers easily. In no time, both will become a prime aspect of digital marketing.
The influencer marketing will also go through a dramatic change as AI automation will come into play.
To know more how Big Data helps businesses gain an insight into the consumer emotions click here.
As per Single Grain, AI can analyze the post data shared by an influencer to ascertain how the post has performed, and how well the influencer is an excellent fit for the brand.
