Evolution of Digital Marketing : How it has become a major industry

Authored by Dr Raj Padhiyar, Founder, Digital Gurukul

In the last five decades, marketing as a field has evolved drastically. While products were promoted through primarily offline mediums, the evolution of the internet resulted in a shift from offline to online promotions. Currently, there are over 6242 marketing technology vendors in the market. 60% of these companies are planning on increasing their investments this year! Digital Marketing has now become one of the most lucrative industries out there and is now a core component of market ecosystems all around the world. With the rising popularity of the internet, digital marketing has achieved exponential success through gradual evolution. At a time when there are more than a 100 million people using the internet on a daily basis, it is only befitting to take a quick look into when digital marketing really came into being. Following are series of phases through which digital marketing industry evolved -

Timeline of how it all began

While the first advertisement on television may have popped up in the year 1949, the following years saw the evolution of technology in a brand new light. The ’50s were all about television advertisements and how people perceived products with a certain character.

The ’80s saw a shift in the way people were buying products, which made it a difficult task for brands to attract new customers. In 1981, IBM launched their first computer called the SQL, which was adopted by the ANSI. During this time the market itself was still finding a unified structure. This is where digital marketing finally was introduced as new features started to emerge. This included client architecture, advents of servers, field sales channel automation, contact strategy optimization, marketing resource management, and analytics. After the first computer was introduced to the public, many businesses had started to target this niche in the market. However, very few of these businesses had actually managed to devise adequate digital marketing services or products.

The early nineties are recognized as the pivotal years for the digital marketing industry. By this point in time, there were over 16 million of internet users. During this time every American spent approximately thirty minutes on the internet. This spurred the growth of many innovations by different companies. With the popularity of the internet, many CRM vendors started to appear and were creating a coherent structure for every digital marketing company. Furthermore, this when pioneers of the industry claimed that information was rich in data and poor in information.

Basically, every business had a substantial amount of data but lacked the resources to make any sense of this information.

The twenties or the digital era has witnessed the highest growth in digital marketing services and products because by this time there were over 558 million internet users. Google went public and Apple launched their first smartphone! All of these innovations set a new standard in the market and induced a ripple effect which resulted in the expedited growth of digital marketing. By the early twenties, many products and services were digitized and marketed on the internet. This is exactly why digital marketing finally created a strong foothold in the market. However, this uncharted territory was still too fresh for marketers to effectively offer service and products that would revamp the entire market structure.

Today, Everything from entertainment to healthcare and banking is on Digital & its channels are playing a vital role in engaging, acquiring and retaining customers. businesses are clamoring to ramp up their online presence and expand their marketing reach with the help of digital marketing. From social media to video content,chatbots, AR & VR, Artificial Intelligence & Machine learning, use of Voice search – to survive & grow- Digital Marketing has become “May be ” to “Must” option for the years to come.

About the Author

Dr. Raj Padhiyar is (Founder – Digital Gurukul – Awarded Asia’s Best Digital Marketing Institute & 12+ Awards), (Founder – SocialLaddoo – Central India’s leading Digital Marketing Agency), (Founder – Emvive – India’s Leading AI based E-Commerce Consultancy agency). 

Dr. Raj Padhiyar has been associated with various companies & Government Organizations. He has trained 4850+ Professionals across various industries & list is growing day by day. He has written several books on Digital Marketing & his thoughts are regularly published in leading newspapers & Magazines.

 Mr. Raj Padhiyar has been appointed as a Committee member of EdTech Committee (IAMAI – Government Of India)