Internet Marketing

Internet technologies transformed marketing from a one-way "push" broadcast endeavor to a two-way "pull" relationship using compelling content to engage consumers with brands. Search engines, e-mail, and social media played major roles in making marketing measurable, cost-effective, and consumer-oriented throughout the early twenty-first century.

Search Engine Optimization and Marketing

As the Internet became deeply engrained in everyday life in the twenty-first century it brought many changes, including a major shift in marketing strategy. The processes of search engine optimization (SEO) and search engine marketing (SEM) became critical to the business world in the 2000s. Marketers began using SEO techniques to improve their websites' rankings in search results by focusing on targeted keywords, and attracting links from other web pages. Marketers also began paying search engines such as Google and Yahoo! to run advertisements next to search results for particular keywords or phrases. Pay-per-click (PPC) ads charged advertisers only when consumers actually clicked.

The top search engine marketplaces in the 2000s were Google AdWords (released in 2000), Yahoo! Search Marketing (formerly Overture, acquired by Yahoo! in 2003), and Microsoft's adCenter (founded 2006). By the 2020s, the renamed Google Ads dominated the marketplace, followed by Meta, formerly Facebook. In 2022, Google earned more than $224 billion in revenue, while Meta earned more than $113 billion.

Online Advertising

During the 2000s, online advertisers recognized the Internet’s potential for tracking and understanding user behavior, and developed sophisticated platforms for targeting advertisements that continue to be used. Popular online advertising companies included Google’s Ad Sense (founded in 2003), DoubleClick (acquired by Google in 2007), Yahoo!, Microsoft Network, AOL, Zedo (founded 1999), and AdBrite (founded in 2002).

Some common ad types were the banner ad, a wide visual advertisement, typically at the top or bottom of a site; the pop-up ad, which "popped up" or appeared in a new browser window; and interstitials, which displayed as sites loaded. As Internet speeds and technologies evolved during the 2000s, multimedia ads with animations and video grew popular. Some publishers offered "site takeovers," allowing a single advertiser to use all ad space on a given website. The content and format of multimedia web marketing continues to evolve.

Internet-based affiliate marketing also grew in popularity during the 2000s. This type of marketing allowed publishers to be paid in exchange for running embedded ad material. For example, a website discussing new eyewear trends could make money if visitors used special affiliate links on the site to purchase glasses. Affiliate payments were rendered only when a product was purchased, making it a cost-effective technique.

Online advertising grew annually from 2002 through 2008 before declining in 2009, due in part to the global financial crisis. Online video ads, however, grew rapidly in 2009, posting a 40 percent improvement, indicating increased consumer engagement with multimedia content.

Internet advertising continued to grow into the 2010s and 2020ss despite ongoing global economic uncertainty and the effects of the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic, underscoring the paradigm shift in the advertising and marketing fields. Industry analysts also increasingly employed the term "digital marketing" in order to encompass both traditional Internet platforms and the rapidly growing market for advertising on mobile devices and other new technology. By 2016, digital advertising was a $73.09 billion dollar industry in the United States alone, surpassing television advertising for the first time, according to the research firm eMarketer. In 2022, worldwide, spending on digital advertising approached $550 billion. A significant contributor to this growth was the rise of online streaming media services, such as the film and television platform Netflix and the music platform Spotify. Such services kept consumers in the Internet environment on a variety of devices, taking market share away from traditional media outlets. This shift in turn prompted marketers to experiment with new ways to understand and target audiences accustomed to instantly-available, customized content.

Metrics and Targeting

Internet marketing represented an opportunity for companies to collect information not only about their target audience, but also about the effectiveness of their ads. While the effectiveness of print ads is difficult to measure, advertisers are able to easily track whether online ads are garnering a response. Vital metrics included impressions (how often ads were displayed), clicks (how often consumers clicked on an ad), and conversions (how often consumers made a purchase after clicking an ad). Online ads were tracked using "cookies," small pieces of data stored on users’ computers.

Cookies are also used to track consumer behavior across the Internet, and many advertising platforms developed the ability to target advertisements on one website by using information about user behavior on another website, a function known as behavioral targeting. For example, if a user searched for a particular brand of running shoes on a retail website, advertising platforms could then display an ad for that shoe on a website that the user viewed later. Geotargeting similarly allowed advertisers to target messages about offers based on a user’s geographic location.

Such sophisticated forms of targeted advertising have met with both praise and criticism. Marketers appreciate the effectiveness of such ads and the fact that money is not wasted marketing a product to those who are highly unlikely to be interested in the product. Many consumers also prefer to see advertisements and receive offers for products and services that they are actually interested in. However, critics have argued that the collection of personal data for purposes of targeted advertising can become an invasion of privacy. While sometimes personal information is given willingly by consumers, in other cases cookies and other forms of data collection operate invisibly. The ethics of Internet privacy continue to be debated as marketing programs grow more complex and privacy advocates respond with technology such as ad-blocking software and anonymous web browsers.

Social Media Marketing

The advent of social media in the 2000s represented an unprecedented channel of communication for companies seeking to connect with customers and understanding their customer’s needs. The most popular platforms for social media marketing included Facebook (founded 2004), Twitter (2006), LinkedIn (2003), and YouTube (2005). Each platform attracted slightly different types of users and supported slightly different marketing techniques.

On social media, brands shared information such as new product release schedules, or compelling stories of consumers using their products. Companies were able to offer special discounts to their social media followers. The ability to share purchases, review products, or discuss brands became ubiquitous. Social news sites such as Digg (2004) and Reddit (2005) allowed users to post links to specific stories and vote on them, providing another source of social media traffic. Ratings services also provided user-generated content that marketers used to promote products and services.

Blogging was another critical component of social media marketing. Easy-to-use blogging tools made it possible for consumers and marketers alike to create online content about products and services. Some marketers targeted amateur bloggers for promotions, offering free products in exchange for reviews. Businesses and marketers created Facebook pages and blogs for their brands, posting updates and encouraging users to interact and share. This type of content creation, which included video and music work, was considered a type of "inbound marketing," designed to pull in users with interesting content.

The phenomenon of "going viral" involves online content spreading rapidly, primarily through social media. Beginning in the early 2000s, going viral became a goal for many companies seeking to generate buzz. However, attempts to create viral videos for advertising purposes often fail, because it is often hard to produce or predict exactly what will resonate with the public enough to attain mass popularity. One successful corporate viral video series was Will It Blend?, wherein the blender company Blendtec portrayed its product blending everything from a cell phone to a football.

The detailed information that social media users share about themselves helps advertisers direct ads more accurately than ever before. Social media also provided ways for ads to look less like ads. "Sponsored Tweets" looked similar to non-ad content shared on Twitter, as did "promoted posts" on Facebook. Social media companies became well-known for "data mining" of users' profiles to develop highly targeted advertising both within the social media platform and for sale to or use by other companies. Many websites offered consumers the option of creating an account or otherwise logging in through an existing Facebook account, giving the new site access to considerable data from Facebook.

Mobile and Local Marketing

In the late 2000s and into the 2020s, smartphones with location-based services enabled by global positioning software (GPS) began to open up additional channels for online marketing. Marketers developed campaigns targeted for display on mobile devices, and sent local offers to consumers in a specific geographic location. Although only about 20 percent of the United States had smartphones at the end of 2009, by 2015 the figure had become about two-thirds of all Americans and mobile had become a crucial marketing channel. Indeed, by 2022 about 85 percent of all Americans used smartphones as their chief personal means of accessing the Internet, according to the Pew Research Center.

The growth of mobile device use was accompanied by an explosion in the development of application software, or apps, which presented an important new channel for marketing efforts. One popular strategy that gained prominence was gamification, in which ads are embedded in games or designed to take the form of a game. Like other forms of digital marketing, advertising for mobile devices has focused heavily on personalized content and integration across multiple platforms and channels. While mobile marketing continues to be viewed as a key area of growth and evolution, it does offer significant challenges. Notably, smaller screen sizes make the formatting and legibility of advertisements difficult to perfect, and the rapid pace of innovation means that change is constantly needed. Moreover, creating unobtrusive but noticeable content can be highly challenging in the mobile context.

Impact

During the first decades of the twenty-first century, Internet marketing, and social media in particular, has transformed marketing into a conversation with consumers. It has provided marketers with an unprecedented amount of data about their audience that is now used to target, test, and evaluate multimedia marketing messages across online platforms. These changes have profoundly shaped the marketing industry as companies scramble to connect with customers in a rapidly evolving online environment.

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