Poised to Change
Synopsis
One of the themes of this eBook is that the Internet marketing world is undergoing a sea change. It is quite different from what it was to start with. The methods have undergone a vast change.
In this chapter, we shall see what these changes have been. We start by understanding a brief history and trends of Internet marketing, which can give an idea of how the Internet marketing world is poised to change in the future.
But the most important part of this chapter is the consolidation of the fact that the Internet marketing world is a rapidly changing world and to keep up with it, we have to move on with the times.
Poised to Change
One very important thing that you should know about the Internet marketing world is that this is a world that is undergoing constant development. The strides that this world has taken in recent times are nothing short of astounding. What began as a simple backup strategy for traditional forms of offline marketing back in the 80s has now blossomed into a full-fledged industry that has taken all the offline marketing methods under its wing. That is quite true; even the multinational corporations of the world rely more on their online marketing modes, and consider offline marketing only as a consolidation for its Internet-based counterpart.
All this could not have happened without the rapid changes that have occurred in the Internet marketing world over the last two decades.
How Internet Marketing Began
Internet marketing had its early roots at about the late twentieth century. In fact, by early nineties of this century, there was a slow growth in Internet marketing. In this time, websites were mainly text based and they were used to give information regarding a certain product or service. The websites started having an impact as they could be accessed from any part of the world.
The first company that launched an Internet marketing campaign was Bristol-Myers Squibb. They launched the use of online marketing officially during 1990’s. It was a United States of America based company which initially had plans to us the online platform to create international awareness of a drug called “Excedrin”. When it was marketing the drug, the company gave some free sample to anyone who wanted to get it through the use of the Internet.
The use of Internet to do marketing started picking up after the company recorded an increase of about thirty thousand people in a few days. These were people who had joined their online customer list. After this time, there were other companies who started using the Internet to market their goods. For example, technology industries that were standardized like IBM and Microsoft started incorporation of their Internet providers and programs in the Bristol-Myers marketing campaigns.
There are some companies that were able to make a huge profit from online marketing campaigns. Yahoo! is the first company to make a lot of money from online marketing campaigns. The Yahoo website quickly became a generator of traffic. They started monitoring hits that every advertisement was getting from online users. This started at about 1997 and by 2000, a lot had changed. Most of the marketing companies that were advertising online had to tighten their revenue. They did so because they were forced by Yahoo to comply. During this time, the company recorded a decrease in customers for online marketing firms. This was due to the so called “Cooling Stage” of the United States economy.
Expenses Used during Early Internet Marketing
The expenses that were used on Internet marketing were very high in mid-nineties. There was a recorded amount of 300 Billion dollars used for marketing online in 1996. This amount was recorded to have been used by the United States, Canada and some of the countries that neighbor this region.
This was almost twice the amount that was used in 1994 for traditional marketing methods. This meant that the online marketing platform was gaining a lot of popularity in a very short while. This was just the beginning as the increase was continuous. When home based business people started using the Internet, the increase was high. This was also followed by the increase of Internet users in the United States in mid 1990s.
Internet Marketing Trends
In those early times, promotion was done just by having a simple ecommerce website where the product was described, mostly with a picture. In fact, most of these ecommerce websites were not even real ecommerce websites because they did not have options for customers to pay and buy the product. These were only a way for people to get accustomed to the product, find information on it, and then they had to visit a nearby store to buy it.
This slowly underwent a change. When the financial biggies of the world realized what great opportunity lay in this world, they were quick to jump into the bandwagon and unleash their different payment modes onto these websites, making them truly ecommerce websites. Thus, methods such as credit card payments (MasterCard and VISA were the first to join in) and online bank transfers (PayPal and Moneybookers being the most prominent) were linked to ecommerce websites. People suddenly realized that they could buy products directly from the Internet. Internet marketing, as they knew it, underwent major strides.
Then came the 90s and the concept of Web 2.0 set in. Marketers now realized that they could do so much more to get their products out there. They could do a lot more to notch up the visibility factor for their products. The start of this was through article marketing and, a little later, blogging. Marketers found that they could write informative articles about their products and services, mostly without naming their products directly, and post them on free and paid directories that were found all over the Internet. They found that doing so brou