A Brief History of Digital Marketing

Learn about how digital marketing started and how it has evolved over time. Discover how companies use digital marketing today and what it means for the future.

A Brief History of Digital Marketing

The term digital marketing was first used in the 1990s, when the digital era began with the arrival of the Internet and the development of the Web 1.0 platform. This platform allowed users to find the information they wanted, but it did not allow them to share it over the web. Marketers used early SEO techniques such as keyword stuffing, over-tagging, and backlinks to generate high rankings. Today, digital marketing has evolved into a powerful tool that allows companies to maintain real-time dialogues with their customers and listen and connect in ways that are relevant to their audience.

The number of marketing channels continues to expand, as measurement practices become more complex. Companies can look for marketing and sales opportunities by reviewing their own reach, as well as the reach of influencers. This prompted marketers to reconsider their approach to content, focusing more on developing strategies for publishing content online. It also had tools to program and track the performance of different marketing media to obtain analytics and better understand consumer buying behavior.

Inbound marketing was one of the main changes that occurred in traditional marketing, leading to the reinvention of marketing strategies to adapt to this important change in traditional marketing. Most people consume some type of digital content on a regular or daily basis and digital marketing has the capacity to reach a broad and specific audience. Today, the number of social media users exceeds 3.5 billion people worldwide, making digital marketing an even more attractive option for businesses. But what do these advancements mean for the future of marketing? Our new digital skills report found that many marketers are unsure of their future and believe that digital marketing will be critical to their organization for the next two years.

Launched by Tim Berners-Lee and his team in 1991, the World Wide Web project didn't really take off until the first successful mass-market browser, Netscape, was released in 1994. Companies now recognize that video marketing is not only in demand, it is also essential across platforms. Digital marketing extends to non-Internet channels that provide digital media, such as television, mobile phones (SMS and MMS), call back, and mobile ringtones on hold. This obstacle was solved by companies like Marketo, Act and Pardot when they introduced marketing automation platforms.

Tommy Staiano
Tommy Staiano

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