A Brief History of Digital Marketing
Although the old ways of getting the word out about a product or service still apply today, much of today’s marketing is conducted on the internet. For almost three decades, digital marketing has been the trend, and this trend is sure to continue. But let’s start at the beginning when the world wide web first captured the world’s attention.
Desktop Publishing to Keyword Stuffing
Once the internet had been firmly established in the early 1990s, marketers all over the world were scrambling to make huge profits . Desktop publishing software allowed skilled designers to capture their audience’s attention with eye-catching graphics and text printed on paper. These helped marketers get the word out about their products or services, which were available both online and in brick and mortar stores.
With the release of Netscape, the world’s first mass-marketed browser, the use of the internet increased from 16 to 70 million. Search engines like Google and Yahoo! had marketer-friendly algorithms, and keyword stuffing for marketing purposes was a prime marketing strategy. Marketers learned how to manipulate search engine algorithms to get their website pages listed at the top of the search results.
The Dotcom Bubble
Digital marketers were making a killing online using what had become outdated ways of reaching potential customers. Keyword stuffing was getting to be ridiculous, to the point that many online articles marketing products or services began putting people off. The dot-com bubble came next in 2001, and many of these digital marketers found themselves starting all over again. They had to relearn the tricks of the trade.
Social media sites like MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn were born between the years of 2002 to 2207. Shared-user experiences could be utilized by marketers to make money without keyword stuffing. Just the fact that users shared large amounts of data on one platform made social media sites’ favorite locations for broadcasting marketing content.
Big data is what made this all possible because you could track a person’s behavior patterns when they visited your website. You could then use this information to send targeted ads to the websites they frequently visited. This kind of tracking for marketing purposes has been evolving since then and was here to stay for the foreseeable future. The invention and popularization of smartphones came next, and the rest is history.
Originally published at https://thomaslooby.com.