How Did Online Marketing Change the Game?

Online marketing has drastically changed the game for businesses all over the world. But how exactly did that happen? Here are the answers.

With the rise of the internet, online marketing has become one of the most essential tools businesses use to reach their target audiences. Online marketing is “the process of advertising and promoting products or services over the internet.” In other words, it’s a way of getting your message in front of potential customers without relying on traditional (and often expensive) methods like television or print advertising. But how did we get here? How did online marketing change the game for businesses? Let’s take a look.

The Invention of the World Wide Web

Before we can start talking about online marketing, we need to talk about the invention of the world wide web. The world wide web was invented in 1989 by British computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee. It’s come a long way since then; as of January 2019, over 1.94 billion websites exist!

The world wide web quickly became a popular way for people to share information and communicate. In 1991, the first website went live. Two years later, in 1993, the first search engine-WebCrawler-was created. The stage was set for online marketing to take off.

The Rise of Email

Email is one of the oldest forms of online marketing, and it’s still going strong today. In fact, a recent study found that email is the most popular form of marketing, with 81% of respondents saying they use it.

Email first became widely used in the mid-1990s, thanks to a little company called Hotmail. Hotmail was one of the first web-based email providers, and it quickly gained popularity due to its ease of use and free access. By 1997, Hotmail had over 8 million users!

The Rise of Search Engine Optimization(SEO)

Not long after the creation of WebCrawler, businesses realized that they could use the internet to their advantage by ensuring that their websites came up first in search results. This gave rise to the practice of search engine optimization or SEO.

SEO is “the process of maximizing the number of visitors to a particular website by ensuring that the site appears high on the list of results returned by a search engine.” In other words, it’s a way to make your website more visible to potential customers by ensuring it comes up as one of the top results when they search for keywords related to your business on a search engine like Google or Bing. For example, a company offering affordable mortgage rates might use SEO to ensure their website appears first when someone searches for “mortgage rates.” They can do this by including relevant keywords on their website and in their web content and by building links to their site from other websites.

SEO quickly became (and still is!) an essential part of any successful online marketing strategy; after all, what good is having a great website if no one can find it? However, since its early days, SEO has changed quite a bit; what worked 10 years ago might not work today. That’s why it’s essential to keep up with current trends and best practices if you want your SEO efforts to be successful. But more on that later.

The Invention and Rise of Social Media

While SEO was busy revolutionizing how businesses reached their target audiences online, another game-changing technology was being invented: social media. Social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter changed how people communicate and get information online; instead of going to specific websites to find out what was happening in the world around them, they could now log into their social media accounts and see updates from all their friends and family in one place. What does this have to do with online marketing? Quite a lot.

Businesses quickly realized that social media was an efficient and cost-effective way to reach their target audiences where they were already spending time online. And so social media marketing was born.”And so social media marketing was born.” Social media sites were quickly incorporated into every successful online marketing plan, whether it was for business or personal use.

However, as with SEO, what works for social media marketing changes over time; platform algorithms are constantly changing (Facebook alone has made over 6 significant algorithm changes just in 2018!), which means that what might have worked last year might not work this year…So now we’re left with this question: how can you make sure your online marketing efforts are successful in 2019 and beyond? Here are some essential tips:

The bottom line

Thanks to inventions like the world wide web and social media, businesses now have more ways to reach their target audiences-and that’s good news for anyone looking to market their business online! However, because these technologies are constantly changing, it’s crucial to stay up-to-date on current trends and best practices if you want your online marketing efforts to be successful.