Digital Marketing - 01 | Definition and History of Digital Marketing

The world of marketing isn't static. It constantly evolves and grows bigger and better every minute. Many businesses are coming up and biting the dust. To sustain in the market, companies and firms are constantly bringing new marketing strategies and innovations, especially in the digital marketing sector.

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Building up an effective online marketing technique requires a ton of skills, passion, learning - and even experimentation. The best marketing strategy will be a mixture of several digital channels. The majority of the businesses out there use more than one digital channel. We are going to discuss all of those channels in detail throughout my digital marketing series.

What is Digital Marketing?

So what is precisely digital marketing? How would you define it? Let me clear that for you. In simple terms, digital marketing is just marketing through digital channels or platforms. Digital marketing is a marketing structure developed to promote brands, products, and services through digital platforms.

Most businesses have a particular audience. They're attempting to reach these audiences through various digital platforms. We know we're talking a lot about these "Digital Platforms," but rest assured, we will be covering every one of them.

When did it begin?

It's been quite some time since we're moving away from traditional marketing; it doesn't mean we have discarded traditional marketing completely. It means that people these days are relying more on digital marketing.

And why shouldn't they?

Digital marketing has proved its dominance and effectiveness over traditional marketing. It has proved to be quite impactful.

Let's look into an example. Back in the day, it used to cost thousands of dollars to just show an advertisement on the television. However, now we can deliver the same advertisements with just hundreds of dollars for the same number of audiences, if not more, over any social media platform.

Forget TV advertisement, what about the ancient times? Did people back then use marketing?
Of course, they did!

They used hieroglyphs to let people know about what they are trying to sell.

This might be an advertisement for a beauty shop. Source

Just kidding! They actually gathered and exchanged their goods. As civilization started to develop, people began using print media as a medium of advertisement. Then we gradually started to use more mediums of digital, from posters to billboards. And finally, we started to incline towards digital marketing when technology rapidly began to develop, and people started to get hooked on them.

It's debatable when digital marketing actually started, but if we had to take a solid starting point, it would be 1990.

In 1990, the first search engine was created. It was called Archie. It was made to be an index for FTP sites. A couple of years later, more search engines started to pop out here and there, including Yahoo! that's when marketers started talking search engines seriously and soon developed search engine optimization.