Digital Marketing in India and its Evolution

India as a country has faced a lot of different standpoints in its rich history that have gone on to become a game changing moment for our country. These could be identified as days, hours or even a year or so that had a drastic effect on how our country looked and moved forward post that particular moment. If you have been following the news, or hearing about them from your family and friends, you will know that there have been many of these moments in the past. There will be many in the future as well because that is how the world moves forward, whether we like it or not.

Today, right in this blog however, we will be talking about one moment that has basically brought you here. Yes, we are talking about the moment that brought the internet to India, and how in essence it led to digital marketing coming to India and then going on to become this big phenomenon that we are now surrounded with. In the last few years digital marketing has gone on to become one of the biggest industries in India and all over the world. There is a lot of history behind its success and how digital marketing has shaped up to become such a big industry in India and an eye catching industry for the young generation to become a part of currently.

How did Start Digital Marketing?

The beginning of digital marketing in India can be traced back to the mid 1990’s, and it has been shaping up slowly and steadily ever since. As you would have widely read during your time in school, internet penetration in India was very slow and at the beginning of internet’s arrival in India, only the high income families could avail internet facilities because of its high cost. This made ecommerce and marketing realistically very difficult for any company. Yahoo was launched in India in 1994 and Google followed suit by coming to Indian shores in 1998. It was in 1996 however that India found its first ecommerce business, with the launch of IndiaMART, a business that is active even today.

During this time, few to no people knew about Search Engine Optimization or SEO, one of the biggest digital marketingchannels of today. It was at the turn of the millennium that new companies started forming and there were whispers in the market about conducting business online and using the internet to one’s advantage. It took another seven years however for internet and digital marketing to embark on a successful path that we now see it to be. With the arrival of Flipkart in 2007, the game changed completely.

Seeing the success of Flipkart and recognizing that this could be a game changer in the long run, other companies started taking their business channels online to help increase their customer base and target a higher number of population within the country and outside. Although the internet spectrum wasn’t as fast until 2010, when the government brought in 3G and other services, it was the beginning of online business and marketing. Marketers were however quietly taking notice of the change in dynamics.

With more and more companies looking to take their business model online to attract more customers, it was a given that this move would also give rise to increased competition. How then could a company differentiate its identity and product from the next? How could they influence people to come and shop on their website or physical stores and not their competitors? The answer, as we now know, was found in the shape of digital marketing. It was during the period between 2008 to 2010 that saw India take a great jump in the number of new digital marketing companies being launched and thousands of people getting recruited in the digital marketing industry for a diverse number of roles.

In 2010, the government brought the 3G spectrum to our country by auctioning it. During this period, more people started using smartphones. This made the people of India create accounts on various social media platforms such as Facebook and LinkedIn, which had been established a while back and growing in popularity every passing day. Ever since then we have seen the development of digital marketing go from the speed of a car to that of a bullet train. New trends have come in the market with more social media platforms stepping up to the plate. The ideation techniques have changed with brands, agencies and marketers alike coming up with some brilliant concepts and lines to promote their brands.

What was once a slowly moving industry has now become a full fledged, well oiled competitive machine, without which the survival of advertising and marketing cannot be imagined. The innovations in the industry, the newer technology that has come up, the fight to survive in the market against one and all and most importantly the right focus on delivering the best to the clients and to the country has helped develop digital marketing and make it reach the stage it now so proudly sits on. It will only grow higher from here and we will be a part of that growth.