Google is turning 21 years old this September. That’s right—sound the alarm, the tech giant is finally old enough to drink! However, it feels like Google and its comrades have been around forever. Let’s take a peek into history and see how things have changed in the last two decades.
Happy Birthday to Digital Marketing
Digital marketing, as a coined phrase, and as a tactic, was born in the 1990s. In terms of the quickly shifting Digital Age, the early 1990s feel like ancient history! Advertising web banners appeared in 1993, but with the birth of Yahoo, search engine optimization (SEO) began running full steam. By the late ’90s, Google introduced AdWords and AdSense, and the sprint for digital marketing became an all-out marathon.
While the “internet bubble” burst in 2000, it looks like we have a digital marketing bubble also about to pop. Because of the variety of marketing efforts that must be taken to advertise to customers, companies have had to adjust by creating and constantly updating several departments and teams. But what if all those groups combined forces and took marketing head-on, Avengers-style?
Taming the Marketing Monster
Consider all the avenues of marketing one company must tackle: digital (SEO, remarketing, etc), print (magazines, newspapers, etc), physical (billboards, bus stop shelters, etc), and social media (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc). Marketing has become a new-age Hydra, one giant mythical lead generation creature with too many heads that seems to be constantly sprouting additional noggins. Each marketing avenue must inform the other, especially when it comes to data and measuring results. If they’re not working in unison and communicating effectively, gaps will occur.
So how do we become Hercules to slay the beast?
Back to Basics
If we tried to neatly list out all the components of digital marketing, it wouldn’t be, well… neat. Consider all the avenues mentioned above—and multiply that by at least 10. The industry uses buzz words like “holistic marketing” to suggest that we have the marketing monster’s many heads all on leashes and walking like a well-trained pup. When the leashes get tangled, you have gaps in marketing efforts appear.
One of the biggest gaps in marketing data is the measurement of consumer relevance. A tough question that Marie Gulin-Merle, Calvin Klein’s chief marketing officer and PVH’s chief digital officer poses is “How do we prove that we provided the right content to the right consumer at the right time?” Positive consumer experience drives positive consumer impact on a company’s marketing bottom line. One way to ensure this happens is to make sure your overall marketing efforts are effortlessly connected visually and with content.
Here at Decantery, we believe in the idea of holistic marketing, but we put focus on effective and time-tested tactics. From creating smooth, extremely user-friendly websites to A/B testing ads for your business’ Google listing, we view digital marketing as marketing. We position ourselves as an external team that always has your best interests in mind, and look for ways to close gaps in the marketing map.
