Did you know that 93% of all online interactions start with a search engine? With businesses – small and big – vying with each other to make their digital presence felt, digital marketing has become a big deal.
Being one of the most cost-effective and fastest mediums of marketing for businesses to expand and grow, digital marketing is being widely used to connect with the global audience. The added highlights of digital marketing apart from the above-mentioned features are measurability and accuracy.
In today’s digital era, nearly 60% of the population uses the internet with most of them addicted to social media. This population is more aware and conscious of the products, services, brands and top competitors.
There are many benefits of digital marketing for businesses and one of them is the advanced use of technology for marketing. Marketing campaigns can be effectively measured and optimized as businesses can have many marketing options within the digital spectrum. The scope of digital marketing is huge and more effective as compared to traditional mediums of marketing. Tweets, videos, podcasts, email, blogs and pay-per-click (PPC) advertising are examples of digital marketing.
To give you an idea of how big digital marketing is, data reveals that there are over 3.5 billion people or 45% of the world’s population on social media. Some of the major turning points of the evolution of digital marketing are listed below.
After the introduction of the world wide web in 1991, followed by Netscape in 1994, people started using the web more and more leaving a huge scope for search engines like Google and Yahoo! to show their mettle in the digital world between the 1990s and 2000s. Search engines and the marketing behind them helped businesses to expand on a larger scale by increasing visibility through search engine optimisation (SEO) strategies and paid promotions.
The age of social media and various platforms not only gave a chance to people to connect globally, but also stay aware about brands through Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and more. Reaching the global audience by collaborating with influencers, brands, specific audiences and other followers has helped businesses to grow over time. Mobile-first marketing With Google’s accelerated mobile pages (AMP) project made it easy for mobile sites SEO. This, in turn, paved the way for smooth accessibility of sites through mobile applications for users by reducing loading time and giving them better customer experience.
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Another huge step in the evolution of digital marketing was the creation of targeted campaigns and customer relationship management (CRM) that enabled brands to connect with customers and maintain long-term relations with them. The use of CRM tools and software has helped to increase overall customer satisfaction.
With the invention of voice search and more interactive content, customer engagement and developing a sense of loyalty have also increased. This is one of the ways the web traffic is attracted to the site and sustains attention over a long period of time. With artificial intelligence and other tools being used widely, digital marketing is here to stay for a long, long time.
Digital marketing is currently used in content generation, product suggestions, e-commerce transactions and many more areas. Increased use of chatbots has improved customer experience and engagement. The new technologies connect the world through more touchpoints and help marketers create holistic and targeted campaigns keeping in mind the future.
Here are some of the top technologies enhancing digital marketing:
Big data
Artificial intelligence
Machine learning
Bots
Voice search
Virtual and augmented reality
Internet of Things and wearables
Blockchain
Beacons
5G
Technology has changed the way you work with more personalized and lively campaigns that have helped marketers collaborate with the audience at large. Marketing technology has entered the architecture and systems that firms are founded on, providing value to procurement and increasing profits.
Fifty-six per cent marketers feel both creativity and technology will play an equal role in establishing where and how marketers engage with their customers in 2022. Thirty percent will put technology ahead of creativity.
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