There’s Method in the Marketing.
Marketing is a necessity for anyone who has a product or service. The industrial revolution introduced us to mass production, and those products needed selling.
Businesses don’t last long without marketing because it’s vital for revenue – marketing is the management and operation of how people are told about a product or service.
People buy from people they like.
Every department and industry has it’s own language and if you don’t speak the lingo it makes life hard. For example if I talk about the qualities of a logo and you don’t know what I’m talking about then that puts an end to our conversation. You can’t sell to everyone because not every product is for everyone. If you serve everyone than you really serve no one.
By the end of this blog you’ll be well versed in the world of marketing, where it’s been and where it’s going. I personally understand things better when I read and talk about them so in this blog – I’m talking about the business of Marketing and how it’s evolved and changed.
Traditional Marketing (1950 – 1994)
Traditional Marketing comprised of delivering information directly to the market, the golden age of advertising in the 50’s showed the world what decent copy (persuasive message) and artwork (visual imagery) could do.
Examples of traditional marketing are:
- Direct Mail – Leaflets, brochures.
- TV Advertising – This can be what you see within the commercial break or product placement in your movies and TV shows.
- Radio Advertising – Exactly what it sounds like.
- Outdoor Advertising – from billboards to bus stops.
- Print – newspapers and magazines.
Traditional Marketing and the web (1994 – 2004)
The generation before revolved around buying media which is space for sale – newspapers for example, needed to know how much space to reserve for advertisers. Space like this is finite but then along came the internet to change the way we communicate forever.
Business in this era could strengthen the relationship between product and the market with no need to print, no longer did companies need to send out brochures when they could host images online for the world to see.
In 1990 the term “Digital Marketing” was first used and in this same year the first search engine was launched – called Archie. The first clickable web advertisements called banners came along in this decade along with the giant Yahoo!
Web – Centric Marketing (2005 – 2009)
Technological developments saw the spread of better internet to more parts of the globe. This allowed advertising campaigns to lead audiences direct to a website. It began that people took the web more serious, every billboard, TV commercial, radio spot and printed article had a website mentioned.
A website is virtual real estate accessible to all.
Enticing consumers to learn more, tools of the trade such as email marketing, a one to many channel was open for business.
- SEO: Search Engine Optimisation is the act of making your webpages as easy as possible for engines to find you. In a nutshell that’s it – how you do it is far from simple.
- PPC: Pay Per Click, when you pay search engines to position your content to the people you want to see it.
Modern Marketing (2010)
Today we are in a realm where digital marketing is storming ahead of conventional forms of reaching an audience, print needed to be picked up and read – now it’s people picking up their phone instead.
The company website has shifted from computer to devices we carry with us most of the day. According to Drum, in 2019 social media spending will continue to grow at the expense of print.
“Since it began in the mid-1990s, internet advertising has principally risen at the expense of print. Over the last ten years, internet advertising has risen from 12% of total global spend (in 2008) to 44% (in 2018). Meanwhile, newspapers’ share of global spend has fallen from 25% to 8%, while magazines’ have fallen from 12% to 4.5%.”
Social media ad budgets continue to grow at ‘expense of print’, up 20% in 2019
Read the full article
Similarly as digital marketing erodes this spending, we can see budgets on internet display is competing fast with television advertising.
We have a digital ecosystem growing all the time often at the expense of traditional marketing.
Listening to podcasts is linked massively with mobile devices. Podcast listeners are 94% more active on social media than those who don’t listen to podcasts and so a perpetual loop can exist, one feeding the other.
“Podcasting as a whole has been growing rapidly, and as a media format, it now spans over 100 different languages across the world.”
Podcast Statistics (2020)
Read the full article
Now more than ever it’s all about merging branding into the everyday life of the audience.
Marketing is the life blood of every business, ignore it and there is no business.
The reality of what marketing is today is a far cry from what it has been and I think that’s a good thing. No longer are marketers shouting, often the audience is telling us what they want and we need to listen.
What’s your view on Marketing? Leave a comment below and let me know.
I was inspired to write this blog because of an amazing book called “The Illustrated Handbook for Content Chemistry” by Andy Crestodina. I couldn’t possibly recommend this enough!
