Why Internet marketing is just getting started

Someone said to me today, “It must have been great to be part of Internet marketing from the beginning.” Well, it has been. But in truth, we’re still at the beginning. Internet marketing is just getting started. The reason for that is that marketing itself is just getting started. Marketing is just a baby. I say this because we act as though marketing is a widely adopted practice. But it’s not. If marketing was some technical innovation, we’d say that it is still an emerging technology.

Image by Patrick Q via Flickr

The simple fact is that the average company does almost no marketing. Big companies do marketing. Companies that take advantage of traditional media advertising do marketing.
But most small companies do nothing more than an ad in the Yellow Pages. Most B2B companies do no more than a brochure at the annual trade show. These companies focus on sales, rather than marketing.
They don’t take this approach because they are short-sighted or backward. They do so because traditional offline marketing doesn’t work for most businesses–it never has. It costs too much and it can’t reach the right target audience to be effective.
That’s where Internet marketing comes in. It’s cheap and it’s possible to target any group, no matter how small. For the first time, small companies and B2B companies can afford to do marketing that reaches their prospective customers.
That’s why I think marketing is still a baby. Although marketing has been around a long time, it still has a long way to go before most companies focus on marketing the same way they focus on product development or finance or sales. If your company has been ignoring marketing, the Internet is going to force you to face it, sooner or later.