The purpose of the internet has been constantly evolving from its defence routes into a commercial and social platform redefining the way we work, communicate and acquire knowledge as well as products and services.
Business is a competitive space and prior to the maturing of the internet there were few channels for marketing and sales and the majority took traditional mass media and cold calling as the dominant routes to market or had a bricks and mortar business that relied on footfall.
The more people you got in front of, the more chance you had of acquiring customers and that still remains true to some degree today, however instead of all the grunt work coming from sellers pushing their messages at people which they struggled to measure in terms of leads and sales, businesses can combine the networked nature of communications that allow message to be passed, contributed, merged, converged, interacted with and all sorts of other possibilities that traditional marketing and sales approaches could never achieve.
Now businesses can see in greater detail what happens when they produce a new piece of content (advertising or marketing) and enter that into the conversation. Businesses can listen to what people are saying and where they are saying it and react much more quickly.
The world is opening up and changing because of the internet and the way businesses operate are also changing as barriers continue to fall between buyers and sellers.
What has been lacking is the strategy and technology to make these new developments a reality for businesses without being forced to spend a fortune and that is now happening. David can now take on Goliath as the marketing playing field is being levelled.
New technologies in marketing automation like HubSpot and Marketo are making time consuming and complex integrated marketing approaches a reality by connecting together steps like effective traffic generation, conversion, integration and measurement into a single unified system, similar to what happened in the communications industry with unified or converged voice, video and data over a single network.
Less time is spent on getting things working and keeping up to date with new technologies so that more time can be spent on creating, measuring and adapting.
This I believe is a major leap forward and is the signal that the foundations of maturity are certainly here. Its now up to businesses to start adopting these new developments along with the strategies that are essential to make them work to really make Internet Marketing a mature space for business.
So what else do you think needs to happen before we can say that Internet Marketing is now a mature business development strategy, or have we got a way to go before that really happens ?
