Showcase Websites and the advent of Digital Marketing

How many minutes can you stay without checking your smartphone? And your social accounts? How often do you update your Facebook status? Exactly. Day by day, our life is going more and more digital. But let's take a step back and see how did we get here.

This digital era started around the 1980s when personal computers and softwares began to emerge for the first time on the market. Of course, at the beginning, the use of these devices was reserved just to a small portion of users. Nevertheless, the diffusion of this new technology was so quick and efficient that it shortly ended up to become popular and used in the everyday life of anyone. It is interesting to notice the astonishing results that, year after year, have been achieved by technology. 

The broad diffusion of the digital products and devices brought not only to several and significant social, economical and political changes but also deeply modified the concept of communication itself, affecting even the people's approach to life and their personal relationships.

Of course also businesses were hit by this Digital Revolution and by the necessity of developing new communication and information channels. The first step towards the digital world was intended as entering the web and build an online presence: both B2B and B2C companies started by creating websites – lately defined as “showcase websites”. The showcase website basically consisted in a digital reproduction of the printed promotional material (such as brochures, catalogs, etc) used by the company. The function of the showcase websites was purely informative. They provided contacts and products' descriptions but they didn't add any value and, especially, they didn't ecourage any interaction with the visitors. A concrete Marketing strategy was missing. 

In B2C markets, the evolution from showcase websites to newer digital tools was much effective and quicker than what happened in the B2B ones – probably because of the closer contact with the end users and their requirements. Despite with different timings and modalities, also B2B companies started to be almost forced to include digital tools in their marketing strategies. This process was definitely slow and while nowadays B2C companies keep on looking for new and innovative promotional channels, many B2B companies are actually continuing to use showcase websites and look at the digital world suspiciously – relying only on the offline, traditional channels. 

Obviously also Marketing was deeply modified by the Digital Revolution. Nowadays, in fact, it is possible to refer to all the activities and tools including the use of the digital world as Online Marketing. Online Marketing, Digital Marketing, Internet Marketing: they are all synonyms of a broader and more complete expression of the concept of Marketing itself.

(Photo credits: http://bit.ly/1ImzRj3)