A history lesson in online marketing shows how marketers must evolve and change to seize today’s opportunities if their companies are to see an end to recession.
First there were websites and we pictured them as online brochures. People found our websites mainly because they saw them printed in our adverts and on our business cards. We delighted in the immediacy of sending and receiving email.
Just over ten years ago we still thought it was pretty cool marketing to have a site that could also collect the email addresses and contact details of users. We sent newsletters to our customers and prospects with great effect.
As websites multiplied beyond anyone’s imagination, searching for them became increasingly important. Websites became the first contact many of our customers had with the company, so we added articles and content to interest and persuade them. They stopped being static brochures.
Statistics allowed us to analyse how traffic moved around our web pages and we worked to improve our marketing funnels and enquiry conversion rates.
Google became the dominant search engine and Search Engine Optimisation was born. SEO specialists interpreted the Google search algorithm and built websites that complied with the way their spiders wanted to assess the quality of content.
Google assessed the authority of links from a website by grading it from 0-10 and giving it a PR rank. Links to a website increased its authority, pushing it further up Google’s search results. An SEO market in links emerged and thrived. High PR links became valuable commodities.
Search engines, particularly Google, became fat from the advertising on their results pages which gave companies a quick leap-frog to prominence on a pay-per-click basis.
Blogs were born. The structure and nature of blogs gave them a head-start in Google’s search engine results and PR assessments. Their numbers exploded, massively increasing the pool of links.
Niche marketers exploited these strengths and created thousands of blogs dedicated to selling products through affiliate schemes and running pay-per-click advertising. Blogging brought internet revenues to the masses.
Browsers got cleverer, internet usage continued its exponential growth and Web 2.0 came along. Interaction, personal relationships and multimedia became the new marketing challenges as their platforms absorbed more and more internet traffic. Social sites burgeoned as users ‘stumbled upon’, ‘dugg’ and ‘liked’ links to web pages.
Users’ insatiable desire for the ‘new’ became the driver for the creation of streams of constant content. Google changed its search design to allow searching for the new, distracting traffic from simply looking at the stale, main search results. Users wanted the freshest content. Marketers complied.
Youtube, Facebook, Flickr and Twitter became some of the most important new channels that marketers needed to broadcast on. Doing well on these platforms not only helped boost search engine result ranks, they also pushed links to appear in all the other types of search.
Integrated, cross-platform marketing allowed real time results measurement and marketing planning became more dynamic and reactive. We pushed out a campaign and then hurriedly tweaked, added and subtracted to it so that we could motivate our targeted market.
Search started to lose its grip on web traffic dominance as Facebook grew. Comments and ‘likes’ from users are becoming a new commodity on a marketer’s shopping list. Traffic no longer needs to be directed back to a website because we can engage and convert our customers right there on their chosen social platform.
And more change is on the way. Phones are soon to overtake computers as the primary method of accessing information and interacting on the internet. We’re going local, and big players like Google and Apple are gearing up for it. Local marketing is going to change the game again, but that’s another story.
The history of online marketing has been short but rapidly evolving. Change is accelerating, which has caught many companies with their pants down. Small and medium sized companies that basked in the glory of high search rankings are seeing their market whittled away.
Companies need to develop assets in new market channels if they are to maintain their market share, and they need to do so with urgency. The recession has made many businesses pull back on marketing, leaving huge gaps for new players to seize. The sad truth is that for many of these stagnating companies, the recession will never end.
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I blog about new marketing techniques and how to apply them to the multinational environment of a bustling tourist resort, as well as different ways to use some of the more traditional marketing tools. 
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