…or has it already happened? This is an essay I wrote for the VacationRoost scholarship award of 2013.
Internet marketing is less than ten years old, and yet it has already revolutionized marketing and sales in the world of business. Turn on your computer and your inbox is full of e-mail marketing, and the online sites you visit are covered in web banners that seem to be tailored to your recent shopping history. These are examples of internet marketing and just how much it has changed the world we live in. Internet marketing allows you to communicate with people all over the world, and has reduced corporation costs, promoted lesser known businesses, and promoted immediate purchase of products and services.
No longer do businesses have to deal with the huge overhead of hiring employees in marketing, with the addition of paying for page space in the local magazines and newspapers. You rent space on certain venues and countless visitors are brought to your website throughout the day. With changes in technology, there is almost nothing that cannot be surveyed and analyzed when it comes to internet marketing. Where you click, how often, what you buy – all of this can be traced and used by businesses to help them shape their campaigns to reach the most people. Because of lower marketing cost the prices of products and services drop, making them attractive to more people. Internet marketing has considerably lowered the cost of marketing, allowing businesses to expand and spend more resources on customer service and new products.
Internet marketing has also allowed smaller, lesser known businesses to become available to people around the world. Many small companies, who could not afford the traditional means of advertising, had great products and services that were extremely valuable to people around the world. With limited marketing resources, however, these businesses had no way of marketing themselves. With the help of the internet, a small business can be easily found and patronized. Phone numbers, vision statements, and pricing options are available at the click of a button. New people in the neighborhood can easily find the grocery store, hair salon, local church, and take out restaurant; all because of web banners on the side of the page when they checked their email. No longer do vacation rental services rely on someone searching the yellow pages for a travel agent; now banners and e-newsletters share the joy of sunny beaches with people around the world. With very little effort, a small town business can put itself “out there”, to be found by people around the world.
Thanks to internet marketing and the ease it has provided, more and more people can visit businesses and purchase products immediately. With older, more traditional, means of marketing, the target customer received a card or flier in the mail. Time elapsed between receiving the card and visiting the advertised website. During that interval, interest in the product or service dropped substantially. Now people browsing the internet see an advertisement that catches their interest. With only a click of the mouse, they land immediately on the website. Their interest is still high and the chances that they will purchase while on that site are very favorable. Reducing that time gap between the customers’ interest in the offer and their actual visit to the website is just another way that internet marketing has changed the world of business for good.
Internet marketing is not even ten years old old and yet, the ways it has changed our world seem to be timeless. Many people in the world can not even remember a time when they did not have maps, shopping, and helpful tips available at the touch of a finger or the click of a mouse. We are accustomed to spending time on the web and seeing images and words that catch our eye. A click later we have a new site to help rent a vacation home or a new web page with delicious recipes. While the parents and grandparents of the current generation can remember a time when products and services were marketed over radio or television, the young adults and kids of today find it hard to believe that banners and buttons on the internet are very new ideas. Older people still shudder in remembrance of walking out to the mailbox and bringing back loads and loads of junk mail; today’s teenagers don’t even expect something to come through the traditional mailing system. Internet marketing has brought irreversible changes to the world we live in. Because of the invaluable benefits internet marketing provides, no one will be looking back as technology marches forward. Who knows where our children will be in a century when it comes to the internet.