7 Ways Marketing Has Changed Over the Past 5 Years

Intro

Digital marketing is a multi-billion dollar industry, and it’s not difficult to see why. Everywhere we look, we see evidence of digital marketing in some form or otheror other form. It is used to great effect across multiple industries, for businesses and brands of all types and sizes.

To keep up with emerging technologies and trends worldwide, marketing teams have had to adapt their time-honored strategies and techniques. This has led to many interesting developments. But you don’t have to look back too far to see these effects.

Here are the 7 ways marketing has changed over the past 5 years.

Expanding Marketing Technology Services Industry

The marketing technology services industry is booming! Over the past 5 years, the availability of expert marketing technology has made expert digital marketing accessible to everyone. From small businesses to large enterprises, everyone can now get the marketing tools they need, for minimal expense.

These crucial technology services include everything from website design to customizable apps and SEO services. They are often the solution to smaller brands’ online marketing woes.

Now, with just a few clicks, teams can streamline and even automate many of their most challenging marketing tasks. With the right tools, the possibilities are endless. Although marketing technology is hardly new, the availability of more innovative services is a more recent development.

The last few years have seen an increase in the use of emerging AI and machine learning functionality. Marketing teams now put their faith in algorithms and assess their potential campaign results thanks to predictive analytics.

This is a trend that is set to continue. It’s a good time to be in the marketing technology business. As technology continues its relentless journey on the road to progress, its use for digital marketing will only grow.

More Targeted Email Marketing

Email marketing is a veteran of the digital marketing world. And it remains a highly effective marketing tool, continuing to make an impact year after year. But although it remains important to grow your business email list, it’s even more crucial to know how to properly segment it.

The past 5 years have seen a move to more segmented and personalized email marketing. The creators of many of the top email marketing tools understand this need and list audience segmentation as one of their primary features.

Segmentation allows brands to speak directly to the most suitable candidates about the most relevant products and services. For brands that have very diverse customer bases, this makes a huge difference to their conversion rates.

Email marketing is also more engaging and interactive than ever before, to keep in step with the growing demand for entertaining marketing materials. It’s become commonplace to see graphics, video clips, and dynamic content in marketing emails.

App-Driven Mobile Marketing

Image sourced from Pixabay

The first mobile phone capable of internet browsing arrived on the market in 1996. And so started a marketing love affair with the smartphone. Mobile marketing has grown year on year, and in the last 5 years has shown no signs of stopping.

Two primary reasons are driving this:

1. The prevalence of smartphones in today’s increasingly digital society.
2. The increasing amount of time that people spend on their mobile devices.

The continued growth of mobile marketing has also driven the need for mobile-friendly website optimization. Many people are accessing web content on their smartphones, and not computers, and a site’s mobile-friendliness (or lack thereof) has continued to play a role in website SEO and performance.

But how has mobile marketing changed? It had to face a lot more competition, for one thing. And it’s hard to adapt to new trends.

With the birth of social media marketing and influencer marketing, audiences have had even more reason to stay glued to their handheld devices. This has made ordinary SMS and MMS marketing, once the stars of the show, much less appealing.

In a bid to keep customers focused on their brands while on their phones, many brands have realized the potential of app-driven marketing.

More Engaging Content Marketing

Content marketing has proven to be a more subtle, yet efficient and affordable alternative to traditional marketing. This marketing strategy employs relevant digital assets like blog posts, images, and video clips to attract, entertain, inform, engage, and retain target audiences.

And in the past 5 years, we’ve seen more and more of it. Content marketing has created awareness, extended customer reach, and ultimately, increased sales for brands big and small. However, a need for more attentive SEO and customer-driven content has arisen.

There’s been a shift away from keyword stuffing and excessive links. Content _quality _is now prized over quantity. And content marketing teams now pay more attention to location-specific and content-focused marketing.

Content remains one of the best ways to increase conversions. Do you want to make the most of your content marketing? Be sure to check out our content marketing tips for increasing conversion rates.

Increase in Social Media Marketing

Social media platforms as we understand them today burst onto the scene in the 2000s. Already reaping the rewards of mobile marketing, it wasn’t long before astute digital marketing teams realized the potential of this next big thing. And they have never looked back.

In the last 5 years, social media has become one of the most effective channels for digital marketing, worldwide. And with the introduction of social media influencer marketing, it has grown even bigger than anyone could have imagined.

Social media advertising and marketing statistics indicate that social media ad spending totaled approximately 270 billion U.S. dollars in 2023. It is expected to surpass 300 billion dollars in 2024. Why? Because it works!

Social media continues to dominate the average consumer’s waking hours. It has even been suggested that it is quite addictive, and therefore an even more lucrative marketing tool. This all makes social media users more susceptible to social media marketing.

However, with so many brands competing for their attention, the need for ever-more-engaging social media content is becoming more difficult to satisfy.

Image sourced from Pixabay

Use of Influencer Marketing

The use of influencer marketing has grown exponentially in the past 5 years. And there’s a very good reason why it’s so popular. It allows brands to target specific audiences through an influencer they can relate to. When carefully chosen, influencer marketers are especially effective at engaging niche markets.

It is an incredibly versatile approach too. Influencer marketing has been used to great success across industries, for everything from fashion, cosmetics, and accessories to health foods, sports goods, and tech products. Even the travel and tourism sector has benefitted from the use of influencer marketing.

So, how has this changed? Haven’t brands always relied on spokespeople for their products? Yes, they have. But whereas these spokespeople were industry experts back in the day, they now don’t even have to be related to the brand’s industry (although it helps).

Influencer marketing is more about the target than the product. Brands focus not so much on an influencer’s relevancy to the product or service, but rather on their relevance to the target demographic. For example, it is not unusual to see travel brands leveraging celebrities to influence star-struck fans.

Integration of AI in Marketing

Of course, no discussion of the changing digital marketing landscape is complete without mentioning artificial intelligence (AI). Indeed, AI has changed marketing in ways we never dreamed possible.

It has been used in sales and marketing, in one way or another, for many years. First, for product recommendations, then for spinning out marketing content. Eventually, brands came to rely on it for predicting user intent and offering round-the-clock customer service.

Of all of these, the increasing use of bulk AI-generated content has been the most significant change in the last 5 years. More and more brands are using it to hit the right SEO notes and boost conversions. But there’s a caveat — it can reduce their perceived authenticity.

So, what has Google’s reaction to AI content been the past 5 years? Well, it hasn’t been that positive. And here’s why. AI absolutely has a place in marketing. But when it is used to churn out as much content as possible without thought for authenticity or accuracy, it creates a problem.

AI content is a speedy and cost-efficient method for creating marketing content. But even as technology evolves, and digital marketing evolves along with it, people respond most favorably to that unmistakable ‘human touch’.