Past Present Future of Internet Marketing by: Ronell Santiago

In recent years, marketing has changed dramatically. Back in the old days, one annual planning meeting to create a go-to-market strategy, marketing plan and budget used to be sufficient.
Today, marketers adjust course frequently and modify plans according to real-time customer insights, new media, emerging channels and technology.
New media adoption rate used to be “relatively” slow. TV was introduced in 1947, and its adoption (measured by percent of penetration in the population) plateaued after 50 years. By comparison, the Internet, introduced in the early 1990s, reached its peak penetration in less than half the years of TV. Although we don’t know where mobile Internet adoption will ultimately end, existing stats indicate a rate exponentially higher than that of its predecessors.
Next, the notion of “viral” marketing has taken content distribution to the next level. This “earned” media — media that does not require marketers to purchase an audience, but rather “earns” its interest — can capture audiences at an unprecedented rate.
But with all the hype around big data and multi-channel management, we still hear from marketing leaders that today’s software and computing platforms lack true integration capabilities and fall short in providing real-time access to data. Cross-channel management between point solutions that optimize email, Web, social and mobile, is more a “hype” than reality.
At Salesforce.com’s annual Dreamforce event, CEO Marc Benioff proclaimed that marketing will be the software giants’ next $1billion dollar business. Gartner reinforces this prediction and projects that by 2017, CMOs will spend more than CIOs on technology. The market is definitely demanding cloud-based, digital marketing solutions, and companies are investing in development to deliver.
 Many systems will be built on older platforms. Challenges for big data processing and system integration are harder to achieve than ever. In the meantime, digital marketers will continue to encounter problems with systems that fall short on their promises of real-time data processing.
The tools and interfaces familiar to marketers will change. Tools will combine data visualization and manipulation with content creation capabilities.
There will be no enterprise software system that can fulfill the promise of being the central system of record. 

By: Ronell Santiago