How Digital Marketing is Taking Over the Marketing Space

The term digital marketing might sound new but it has been around for over three decades. The term was invented and used in 1990 and was used to help users find information on the world wide web.

However, as more people began using the internet over the next two decades, companies began to find out that they could use the internet to create awareness of their brands and build their customer base.

So, how did it come to be?

1.     Smartphones

It is hard to imagine just how widespread smartphones have come to be from just a decade ago. The devices exploded over the past decade, since 2009, and have now taken over from personal computers as the primary device of accessing the internet.

To capture this huge potential customer base, many companies then began to turn digital so that they could capture as many people as possible, as more people are spending time online than watching TV or reading print media.

This has led to Agile marketing, where brands use social media platforms such as Twitter and Instagram to communicate and interact with customers and potential customers, leading to an explosion of a customer base that is mostly online.

2.   Affordable and profitable

Digital marketing has emerged as very cost effective when measured against the potential gains a company could reap.

While previously, companies needed to spend a fortune to get the public to be aware, these days, just a single, strategic post on social media could give company visibility to tens of millions of potential customers, all at a relatively small cost.

This high potential profit-cost ratio means that many companies now primarily focus on digital marketing as a way of making themselves relevant to the public, leading to an implosion of digital marketing.

3.   Ease measure of results

Traditional marketing often needs months of analysis to figure out if a marketing campaign was effective. However, in the digital space, the feedback is easy to measure, both to the naked eyes and to metrics. A single tweet from a company can generate likes, comments, and shares, which points to the marketing strategy being effective even before KPI (Key Performance Index) books are opened.

With the digital space still growing, and marketing still evolving to accommodate in changing internets, digital marketing is only likely to grow bigger and become better in the future. As for the moment, though, the shift from traditional media to the digital space means that the digital marketing takeover is well and truly underway.