Andrew Martin January 28, 2025

How Has Digital Marketing Changed Over the Last Decade?

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If you have worked in digital marketing for any length of time, you know just how rapidly the field can change. For example, it’s possible to write long, in-depth articles about how the most recent Google update changed digital marketing.

Sometimes, though, distance gives us clarity, allowing us to see what are the major changes that have made a lasting mark, and which were flash-in-the-pan fads. Here are some of the major changes that have shaped digital marketing over the last decade.

Video Dominance

video dominates digital marketing contentJust as television took over from radio once it became available, video has come to dominate the content consumed on the internet. Video now represents more than 80% of internet traffic, including video-only social media platforms like YouTube, which has 2.6 billion monthly users and TikTok, with nearly 1.6 billion. This means that digital marketing has also had to adapt to using video content for its messaging.

There are some advantages to this. People retain more content from video advertising than they do from written ads. In particular, it’s easy to expand brand recognition with very short video snippets. The downside can be the expense of creating video, although there are some ways around this, such as the use of user-generated content (UGC – more on this later).

However, just as radio and even books continue to be a significant presence in the age of television, other types of content like podcasts and written pages remain important parts of content marketing (after all, you’re reading this).

Merging Mobile

There’s no doubt that smartphones have transformed the way people experience the internet and how they consume digital advertising. This transition was in full swing in the early 2010s, when people were struggling to figure out how to design, build, and write websites to appeal to phone browsers.

The importance of this issue increased significantly in 2016 when Google announced mobile-first indexing: it would primarily use the mobile version of your website for indexing and ranking. Google recommended responsive design, which uses the same code for all types of sites but adjusts the display to match the visitor’s device, and that’s become the new standard for web design and development. As a result, most websites will deliver a similar experience no matter the device.

Google announced that it has completed its transition to mobile-first indexing in 2023, so now every site is ranked based on its mobile version, essentially putting this issue behind us: we’re all mobile now.

The Rise and Decline of Influencers

social media marketing influencerTen years ago, all digital marketers had embraced social media marketing as one of the key tools for reaching people online. After all, scrolling social media had already become a favorite pastime for young and old alike. From the beginning, Facebook has been an advertising platform, and most other social media sites are also full of marketing content.

However, a side effect of the saturation of commercial content on social media is that people became skeptical of the content brands pushed through their profiles, significantly diminishing its effectiveness. Instead, people looked for more authentic content produced by actual consumers of the product as the true social proof of a product, the social media equivalent of word-of-mouth. Many brands have sought to leverage this UGC for their profit.

At the same time, people who developed large social media followings, known as influencers, began to demonstrate their effectiveness to sway their followers to choose certain lifestyles, habits, and, ultimately, products. Although influencers often receive free products and even payments to endorse products, their message is seen as more authentic than social media content produced by brands themselves.

The conventional wisdom is that the heyday of influencer marketing is passed, but they can still be a potent digital marketing strategy. The key is to maintain the authenticity that made influencers a powerful force to begin with. Today’s neo-influencers might be more likely to style themselves as content creators or even artists, and recruiting them might take more courting (though possibly less money) than in the past.

Big Data

One of the things that has always made digital marketing different from traditional marketing is its reliance on data. This data plays an important role in both sides of the digital marketing equation. First, digital marketing has always relied on the ability to track the activities of users and their interests in order to target the right customer with the right ad. Instead of small focus groups or test marketing, digital marketing can look at people’s actual online behaviors to build a marketing approach that is essentially guaranteed to meet people’s needs and wants.

Second, digital marketing has been able to provide specific numbers about its ability to deliver desired results, such as impressions, clicks, conversions, sales, and more. Traditional marketing could never directly link their advertising efforts with a true measure of effectiveness. If you saw an uptick in sales after airing a commercial during a popular program, you assumed that the sales were due to the commercial, but you couldn’t be sure.

Data became extremely powerful in the hands of some advertisers. In particular, Meta, through social media platforms Facebook and Instagram, tracked users’ browsing activity on other sites while they had social media open, giving Meta access to a complete picture of its users’ online lives, which allowed advertisers to powerfully segment their ad targeting.

Over time, these basic realities combined to create the phenomenon described abstractly as “big data.” As people spent more and more of their lives online, including work, recreation, and shopping, this created a massive dataset that was a potential treasure trove for marketers. It gave them all the information they needed to precisely find their target market and provided them with extremely high ROI. However, at the same time, it was possible for people to feel completely overwhelmed by the sheer quantity of data. This created a divide between the marketers who could use marketing tools to sift data and effectively target advertising from those that were unable to perform this level of analysis.

Privacy Maneuvers

However, there has been a countermovement in response to the big data phenomenon. As people saw how effectively they were being targeted by advertisers, they sometimes felt exposed online and began to worry about their privacy.

To help people feel safer online and encourage them to continue browsing, online platforms have started limiting the data they share. This started as early as 2011, when Google started using “privacy mode” for people who were logged in while browsing and searching.

Consumer demands for privacy have continued to result in numerous actions by both governments and industries to protect the data of consumers. On the governmental side, the most influential action was probably the establishment of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) by the EU in 2018. This establishes strict privacy requirements and potential fines exceeding €20 million ($21 million) for violating the regulations.

On the industry side, Apple’s iOS 14 sent shockwaves through digital marketing. iOS 14 made apps ask for permission to track users’ activity on other sites. This not only made it harder for Meta and other platforms to sell highly targeted ads, but it also created a greater awareness of privacy as an issue.

Digital marketing is now an arms race between those who are trying to protect users’ data, and those who are trying to bypass those protections to improve targeting.

AI’s Tentative Debut

AI in digital marketingTo some extent, AI has been playing a significant role in digital marketing since its inception. However, the last decade has seen a huge transformation in the power and utilization of this technology. In 2015, people were more likely to talk about “machine learning” and its application to marketing, in part because the applications were much more limited. For a long time, Google and other advertising platforms have used machine learning to help them deliver the most effective ads. The platforms would learn which ads were more likely to generate results in particular situations and would therefore deliver the more effective ads more often, and often at a lower cpc (cost per click) or cpm (cost per mille – thousand impressions).

In recent years, marketing algorithms have gotten more sophisticated, and platforms encourage advertisers to essentially trust the algorithm to do their targeting for them, something that reached peak effectiveness before privacy maneuvers reduced their data access. The incredible advances in this area were largely unappreciated outside the digital marketing field.

AI, however, was presented as a completely different innovation in recent years. The debut of ChatGPT, with its supposed ability to perform tasks like writing ad copy in a way that could rival human writers, was widely celebrated, and marketers rushed to find applications for this powerful and easy-to-use text generator. The initially impressive results did not hold up well under closer scrutiny. As a result, Google made it clear that it would penalize sites that used AI-generated content. Many of those who touted AI content at first suffered big losses in their rankings.

However, AI technology has continued to improve, and the quality of writing (as well as art) produced by AI is getting better, especially with close human moderation. Now, Google has clarified that it will reward high-quality content, no matter how it was produced. The outstanding question is: given the high energy and water demands for AI, will it actually be able to produce quality content in a cost-effective way compared to human writers?

Webolutions Can Help You Leverage the Latest Digital Marketing Best Practices

The items discussed above are some of the most impactful changes we’ve seen in digital marketing over the last decade, but they’re not the only ones. In an industry that evolves as rapidly as digital marketing, relying on best practices from even just three years ago can cause you to fall behind some of your competitors that are staying more current on the latest digital marketing trends. In order to maximize the impact of your marketing efforts, it’s critical to stay current on the latest developments dominating the landscape. At Webolutions, we have you covered.

Webolutions has been Denver’s leading digital marketing agency since 1994. We started out in the fledgling years of the internet, and we’ve witnessed digital marketing evolve from a nascent industry into the most prominent way businesses reach their audience. During this time, we’ve continuously monitored the ways in which new strategies, marketing channels and techniques have changed the landscape to ensure our clients are leveraging the latest best practices.

When you work with Webolutions, you’ll benefit from our exclusive Intrinsic Multiplier™ Approach focused on growing your business smarter, faster and easier. This transformational approach to digital marketing shines a critical lens on your business, helping your team understand what makes you truly special and unique. This helps us identify your industry leading market positioning, making it easier to differentiate your business from your competitors.

Based on the information gathered during the market positioning process, we’ll work with your team to develop compelling brand messaging that highlights your core values, purpose, mission, specific strengths, and unique culture. This brand messaging will form the basis for all content distributed throughout every aspect of your digital marketing strategy to ensure your audience understands what makes you special, regardless of where they interact with your brand online.

Our team offers comprehensive digital marketing services and can manage every aspect of your marketing efforts, providing the cohesiveness to build your brand and generate the quality leads necessary to grow your business.

Contact us today to schedule a free consultation. Webolutions serves clients nationwide from our offices in Denver, Colorado.

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