The whole scenario of marketing has been changed for years. A new form of marketing comes up named- Digital marketing. With time the evolution of digital marketing has been advanced. Now technology has changed the marketing methods and the way marketers connect with their audience.
At present nearly 4.57 billion people use the internet. The evolution and increasing use of the internet gave rise to a new form of marketing i.e. Digital marketing. Digital marketing has made the work of marketers easy, faster, and more accurate. Rather than target in the dark to the general public now marketers can actually find out their potential customers and target them.
Evolution of digital marketing has developed things like e-mail marketing, influencer marketing, affiliate marketing, e-commerce marketing, etc which helps marketers to target customers easily. These facts made it crystal clear that the evolution of digital marketing has made things easy and more personalized.
The latest evolution in digital marketing is the internet of things, artificial intelligence, machine learning, voice search, and personalization.
History of digital marketing
The mid-2000s caused a great change in the customer’s behavior in terms of shopping and lifestyle. The ease of purchase and convenience of delivery becomes the topmost priority of the users. This made them research online vigorously to find the products or services they want.
This behavior of the customers made it difficult for marketers to find out what consumers exactly want. Therefore to target potential audience marketers starting using data insights and analytics to know the queries and actions of users on their website. This further develops when marketing automation comes into play.
Marketing automation is simply a technique to automate repetitive tasks like e-mail marketing, social media scheduling, etc. This makes marketing experience more personalized along with this and your marketing time and efforts are also saved.
The year 2005 was a pivotal year in digital marketing as it was dubbed by many as the “Year of Google.” The term “digital marketing” was coined during this time period because of how much importance Google placed on data based advertising and how it enabled advertisers to create more targeted ads with better reach.
How google played an important role in digital marketing in 2005:
Google Adwords was founded in 2003 and became the number one keyword ad placement platform.
Google Analytics became available as a free tool in 2004, which allowed marketers to measure user behavior on their websites with advanced analytic system.
How social media marketing developed as an extension of the evolution of digital marketing
Social media has evolved faster than any other form of marketing. It is a very important part of digital marketing. Social media is something which didn’t even exist some years back but now it is one of the most important parts of daily life and even business. 80% of the younger generation spends an average of 10 hours on social media.
Now as a part of digital marketing, 90% of brands have an active presence on social media.
With the increasing number of social media platforms for different kinds of business, the content and blogs started gaining more visibility, reach, and traffic.
Now Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, Pinterest, tumbler, mix, Reddit, LinkedIn, and many more options are available as compared to the past when just Facebook and twitter were there.
At present brands use social media for various purposes like bringing traffic, increasing leads, competitor analysis, reaching new customers, increasing engagement, and increasing conversion.
Also know- how digital marketing course help you to cope up with the evolution of digital marketing.
The present of digital marketing
Mobile marketing-
Evolution of digital marketing gives a way to mobile marketing. It is basically the marketing of products and services to mobile users by optimizing your website or pages for mobile. Marketers said that 50% of their leads and conversions are from mobile. If mobile marketing is used properly according to the user’s location and interest it can easily boost up the conversion rate by 50-60%.
The Mobile era has already arrived but still, some marketers believe that mobile marketing is the future of marketing. But the fact is that presently, mobile marketing is of immense importance and the marketers who still did not adopt this will have to face stiff competition and drawbacks.
Some best mobile marketing practices are-
- Be clear and convenient
- Optimize for local locations
- Consider your audience properly
- Measure your results
Personalization
Personalization in the context of digital marketing is not a new concept. It is an evolution to discover new ways to increase digital marketing for the purpose of improvement of the business. Though personalization has gone a long way, still a lot is required to be done.
There are many tools and platforms through which personalization can be achieved. Here big data and user-generated content can play a crucial role in the process of personalization. User-generated contents are a source of empowerment for consumers. It provides unlimited resources for creating inputs and also provides emotional bonds between brands and consumers.
Personalization gives an insight into the consumer which helps in increasing relevance. The new generation which is mainly mobile-friendly now interacts with smartphones, T.V. laptops, desktops, and iPad which are the latest forms of personalization.
Voice search
Voice search is the in-thing for the future. In fact, it is destined to bring a revolution in the way search is done and the way marketers make their strategy for marketing. Voice search is a form of mobile search using speech recognition technology. A few years back voice search was a comparatively new phenomenon.
It was used for fun and not taken seriously. With the passage of time, it has evolved into an important source of conducting business through voice assistance devices. Personal digital assistants have become very popular and voice assistance is increasingly shaping consumer behavior.
To keep pace with the vastly improving voice search technology it is of paramount importance to optimize your SEO for voice search. To achieve it, contents should be shaped in the answer specific mode.
Content should be rather in question-answer form. People prefer to search via mobile due to its hand-free capabilities. Unlike desktop, people prefer to utilize the voice search facility when on the move through mobile.
Internet of things.
Direct connection with consumers through smart devices is an extremely important feature that IoT offers to digital marketing. It alleviates the need to walk to a store to buy items and thereby saving time and effort. Different devices are connected with each other through IoT system.
This results in the creation of a huge amount of data. It is a proven technology for strong marketing. IoT has the potential to become a great advertising tool through its capability to generate high-quality data about consumers’ product experience. With the rapid improvement in IoT, it is possible that in the near future it will totally align with the behavior and past purchases of consumers.
Data acquired from IoT can be of immense help for understanding the everyday lifestyle of customers and even may reach the customer’s mind. Its ability to connect any device to the internet provides many opportunities for the advertisement of the product.
IoT help feed machine learning algorithms generate massive data. This further enhances the capability of predictive analysis.
Artificial Intelligence.
Evolution of digital marketing gve rise to artificial intelligence. Artificial intelligence is the brainchild of computer science which leads us to understand and mimic human conversation and human behavior. It is a machine that is fed the data. On the basis of such data, it can think, respond, and perform tasks like human beings. It gives results that are precise and more accurate with fewer errors.
Artificial intelligence is being introduced to various types of business, be it customer handling or managing data. AI will always remain in the process of evolving more and more than a day will come when AI tools may surpass human beings in certain aspects.
With its ability to make data-based decisions with speed its importance has increased manifold. With the arrival of semantic recognition, language processing, and voice conversion AI services can easily be used to provide a better customer experience.
Latest trends in digital marketing
- Chatbot
- AR and VR
- Social media stories
- Live streaming
- Video Marketing
Chatbot-
As in 2020, 90% of the customer’s questions and query answers are actually given by chatbots. Chatbots have improved and advanced the way marketers communicate with their customers. This led to a strong relationship between marketers and customers as they get instant replies.
The chatbot is available 24/7 to answer your queries. When customers get instant answers their experience with the brand improves. This results in higher leads and conversions. Chatbots actually work on present situations according to the action of the user on your website.
A chatbot is highly helpful in decreasing the bounce rate of the page as when chatbots start a conversation with the visitor it not only attracts their attention but also increases their time on your website. This results in a lower bounce rate and higher time spent.
AR and VR-
Augmented and virtual reality are both present and future of digital marketing. These are one of the best innovations of technology that took user experience to the next level. Now more and more brands are starting to use it to make their campaign look real and creative.
Moreover, 53% of people have said that they are more convinced with the brands that use AR and VR. Virtual reality allows users to see products in real life but the images are generated by the computer. Whereas augmented reality allows users to view things in real-world using the camera of the smartphone.
One of the best examples of augmented reality is Instagram and Snapchat filters and lenskart apps. Virtual reality allows customers to try and look for different varieties of products and helps you to choose the best one.
Social media stories –
With the increasing use of social media, its platforms started increasing. Earlier there were just 2 platforms i.e. Facebook and twitter but now there are a lot of options available. Moreover, increasing usage of these platforms for different purposes led to the addition of new features and updates.
One such feature is stories. Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat have now provided the feature of social media stories that connect visitors to the business in real-time. The stories are highly useful to send viewers to your posts. This also helps in increasing traffic and engagement to social media posts. Now direct links are also provided on the stories that send users to the website also.
Live streaming-
Another feature is live streaming which helps customers to directly connect and interact with the business. Their problems and queries can be solved instantly in a live stream video. Live streaming gives marketers an opportunity to connect with the new customers who have not interacted with your business earlier.
It also helps to build a strong relationship with your customers and clients. Along with all these things, a major advantage of live streaming is a strong trust of customers in your brand. They believe live stream videos are most real as they are unedited and to the point. Many marketers use the option of live streaming to launch new products and tell people about their use.
Also, live streaming is highly helpful in creating interactive content and organizing live question-answer sessions, polls, interviews, and events.
Video marketing–
Video marketing is the most important trend in today’s marketing scenario. Videos improved conversion rate by 70% and consumers say they are more affected by a video rather than images. Video is an interactive content that allows users to learn about something easily and conveniently. Video is easy to share on different platforms along with rich snippets.
