I took the digital marketing track in college almost as an afterthought while working through my degree. Currently there’s no degree or even minor offered for digital marketing in the whole country (a few schools claim to teach digital marketing, but it’s usually a web design teacher adding a class to the traditional marketing curriculum). But you can bank on not just dedicated courses, but entire degrees dedicated to the methodology of SEO, digital advertising, email campaigns and analytics in the coming years.
The Evolution of Marketing Theory
It’s almost mandatory for marketing students to watch Mad Men. I had Don Draper questions on at least two finals my senior year. The first several episodes are guaranteed to make students laugh, because we get to watch Don Draper struggle and claw to come up with a way to advertise cigarettes after the Surgeon General outlaws the health claims that had previously been used. Modern students laugh because we were taught to think about marketing in a very different way. After all, people don’t buy cigarettes because they’re healthy; they buy them because it’s part of a lifestyle they subscribe to. The best thing an advertising firm could have done is ignored the legal shift and pushed a new message.
And then students stop laughing and start soul-searching when they realize that they have the dangerous ability to more effectively sell deadly toxins than their predecessors. That’s dark.
It was only in recent years that Clayton Christensen taught us to think about marketing in terms of the “job” that customers “hire” products to do (Milkshake Marketing). For decades and centuries, we thought marketing was about interrupting people and proving to them how much they wanted our product and how much better our product was than the competitors’ products (check out this infographic on the history of marketing).
Technology has been offering new media to reach potential customers, and the internet is just the next stage in that process. Digital marketing is taking over, not because the internet is so different from TV, Print, Radio or Telephone, but because it’s more ubiquitous. Across most demographics, the internet has all but replaced those media.
The Age of Content Marketing
Many of us are still old enough to remember blinking popup advertisements and chain emails. And really, those were just newer versions of old tactics. If you spend enough time in publishing circles, you may still stumble onto some web 1.0 sites that will nostalgically spam your browser. But CANN SPAM and Google’s increasingly sophisticated search algorithms have substantially punished low-quality, low-relevant sites to the point that it is simply easier to reach people by publishing content that they actually want to consume.
This has created a shift in thinking in both the online and offline world. Companies need not be (should not be) “salesy.” All they have to do is draw you in by serving you first. Report and trust is built as companies demonstrate their superior quality prior to the pitch.
Online Reputation Management
Public Relations has been on a collision course with Marketing for a long time, and the fusion between their worlds began long before the digital area. This unification was accelerated when companies realized the availability and damage of negative reviews or other brand-damaging online content. Thus was born the love child of marketing and PR: Online Reputation Management. Reputation X has this article on the history of online reputation management (orm).
Gimmick, or the Way of the Future?
It should be pretty clear by now: barring total nuclear war, the internet isn’t going anywhere anytime soon, and neither is digital marketing. However, there is a danger as PPC and Link Building supplant billboards and TV Ads. The “how” of marketing is shifting, but the fundamental principles behind marketing must have a place in the new world order. Marketing is still about segmentation, targeting, budgets, and ROI. Remarketing is still cheaper than acquisition (in fact, more now than ever). But if your business still operates primarily on print media advertising and post office mailers, be warned!
