Thirty years in the past and future of the marketing world.
Digital Marketing.
BY Nariman Azzam – Content Dream Team.
For the past years, marketing had to keep up with the technology, and having a relation to it became crucial. The sales world witnessed the invention of the phone and the marketing age. The evolution of marketing was the most significant change in the history of marketing. The first kind was first available for personal computers. What do these developments make in the marketing future?
Marketing professionals are unsure of the marketing future and think that digital marketing is becoming critical to specialized organizations in the marketing era. It is essential to consider the three main technological developments that changed how we look at the marketing world: the internet, big data, and smartphones.
The Internet
The internet became a mass adoption in everyday life and became the most prominent event that affected its marketing strategies. Desktop publishing software was available on the first PCs in the 1980s. Computers became a glorifying step towards boosting the marketing of typewriters. Tim Berners – Lee and his team launched the World Wide Web project in 1991 that wasn’t successful until the mass market browser Netscape was published in 1994. After two years, the number of people who started using the internet for marketing purposes was 16 to 70 million online users. When the online users increase, and the landscapes evolved from email to search engines like Yahoo and Google and e-commerce websites such as Amazon and eBay. This became a goldmine for marketing strategies. SEO techniques were used by marketers like keyword stuffing, tagging, and backlinks that generated the highest rankings. Furthermore, Razorfish, the most prominent interactive agency, was a key player in SEO and played a significant role as a pioneer of the Netscape browser’s server push.
Big Data
The online activity was stored as digital information as physical counterparts such as paper, film, and opticals – DVDs and CDs. Discoveries in data recording and data technology provided big data as a new and irreplaceable resource for the marketing departments. Furthermore, social media platforms such as LinkedIn began in 2002, Myspace in 2003, Facebook in 2004, and Twitter in 2007, making marketing widely available for online users and marketers who share similar online personal data. On the other hand, tracking patterns became possible for the big data trending the human behavior and became a marketing role that was set to increase. Data-driven marketing gathered the information for several companies that emerged to specialize in harnessing technology, such as Optimove, Oracle, and Domo. Optimove was specialized in marketing using the power of analytics. Its marketing cloud used big data to conquer emotional intelligence that was crucial to connect with customers more effectively, allowing users to build new strategies that strengthen customer relationships.
Smartphones
Where would the world be without smartphones and tablets? The new mobile devices exploded in the previous decade, making all the marketing departments catch up. Nowadays, smartphones overtook personal computers as digital devices to go online. The hours spent online drastically increased from 45 minutes in 2011 to 258 minutes in 2017 to 540 minutes in 2020. The early cellphones launched in the 1970s and 1980s were meant to be used in cars while attempting handheld computers. The first real modern smartphone was made by BlackBerry in 2003, supporting email, text messages, phone calls, and web browsing that business professionals mainly used. It was only until 2007 that smartphones started to shine when the groundbreaking iPhone was released. The whole world moved online and inside our pockets. Where are we going from here? A future of transparency and acrobatic marketing.
Today, information is everywhere. Customers became smarter and could research desired services and products in seconds in comparison to competitors and reviews. On the other hand, SEO improvements made keyword stuffing and backlinks an issue from the past, paving a way to provide real value and excellent content that makes new marketing styles. The urge to have transparency became crucial and necessary to the quest for customer perceptions of brands. Distribution of content is everything, and it is a massive part of the new online life, and the upcoming generations will have a different way of information that will be viewed and shared. Therefore, one of the main reasons for agile marketing to rise is social media, where brands have spent the last years trying to figure out the best ways to communicate on platforms like Twitter and Facebook. These platforms provide insight into what works best and the type of content that reaches the widest audience. Also, numerous brands have their personality on social media, tone, and voice, proving their customers’ transparency.
As the internet keeps changing everything, it is worth remembering the old forms of marketing that still carry weight. Despite the massive growth of marketing, television still stands third for advertisements to spread and grow by embracing trends. Keep up with all the directions all the time while also considering the old for excellent marketing success!
