How Has Marketing Changed in the Last Decade?

A decade is a long time for sweeping changes to take effect and when we talk about the ever-evolving arena of marketing the change can be quite drastic. Advertising agencies have made one big move from traditional or print advertising to digital. Print advertising has lost ground to digital campaigns due to the omnipresence of social media platforms. The strategy of every digital agency in the past decade has been the development of marketing in the digital world.

Today, marketing has priorities like search engine marketing, content marketing, social media marketing, and email marketing, etc. which show how marketing has changed in the last decade towards designing targeted messages for particular channels. Clearly, the strategy has changed from traditional to digital.

Here some changes that have hit marketing in the last decade:

• The tools have changed for advertising agencies. Smarter tools garnered towards inbound marketing techniques are becoming valuable as well as effective. Thus, marketing automation software, for eg. Hubspot, etc. have taken over cold-calling or email blast methods.
• The critical importance of social media has been proven. Marketing today is budgeted around Facebook ads, Twitter tags, and LinkedIn promotions. As the customers moved from physical to digital space, so did the advertising agencies. Hiring social media managers and spending the marketing budget on tools, apps, content creation and management is now a necessity.
• Advertising and digital agencies are going mobile. Print media has always been costlier than digital media advertising and add to that the fact that people are constantly glued to their smartphones. How many customers actually look up at a billboard? A decade ago this wasn’t the scene but today creating posts, videos, infographics, and blog articles that are readable and easy to click on while using mobiles is a key marketing feature for many advertising agencies.
• It’s about the pull, not information. Customers know everything because there is an overload of information in the form online offers, reviews as well as information put out by advertising agencies themselves. Pull marketing, a strategy developed in the last decade ensures drawing customers by making them grow to love your product so that they want to know more about it.

The last ten years have seen remarkable changes in technology and marketing strategies have adapted to them. In 2009, the only smartwatch was from Samsung and you read about it in a newspaper or magazine maybe. In 2019, you are reading about ten different smartwatch reviews in a magazine but on your Smartphone — how cool is that!