Digital marketing has been a term that has been used to describe any type of marketing efforts that take place primarily online. This would include running ads through a display network, social media or native ads on a site. It would also, of course, include all online performance marketing efforts. While this was once just a very small niche of the massive marketing industry, that has changed.
Today digital marketing is a multi-billion dollar per year industry, and growing rapidly. Because of this, some people think it is time to drop the ‘digital’ prefix. In fact, the EMEAR marketing director of Cisco, Christine Bailey, said that it is time to just call it marketing in most situations.
She began by talking about the fact that a couple of decades ago any type of ‘electronic’ marketing efforts were called –ebusiness or eCRM, over time the ‘electronic’ portion dropped off because it was no longer necessary. It became such a significant part of the market that it was essentially seen as an essential component of any business strategy. She went on to repeat a comment by the CMO of Cisco, Karen Walker, “Marketing was the last function to be industrialized and the first function to be digitized. Marching into the future, that means we’re no longer doing ‘digital’ marketing, we’re simply marketing in a digital world.”
Of course, digital marketing will remain a common phrase when discussing different aspects of an overall marketing strategy long into the future. When discussing the marketing efforts of a company in general, however, trying to separate ‘marketing’ from ‘digital marketing’ is not necessary at all because it can be assumed that all companies will be including the digital world in their marketing efforts.
