Within the business field, and business in general, one of the most widely used concepts is that of “marketing.” Marketing can be understood as the processes, actions or strategies from which a value is given to products or services in order to encourage their purchase. That is, they are the actions taken to drive conversions and generate an interest on the part of consumers in the products or services offered. Jorge Zuñiga Blanco, an entrepreneur and business expert from Costa Rica, provides insight into how business communication is changing.

Today, these strategies are mainly in digital media, which has led to evolving the concept of marketing towards that of digital marketing. This has come to replace its predecessor and has been established as one of the pillars of business for companies.

This constant change and the importance it has taken for businesses and companies demand preparation and understanding of its development, which as a response, has led to the emergence of various specialized courses and master’s degrees. In this way, through these new degrees of study it is possible that professionals and interested individuals can be properly trained to face the evolution of this important aspect of the business ecosystem.

“Since its arrival in the 90s,” explains Zuñiga, “digital marketing has been constantly evolving, adapting to the new currents and media that arise in the digital ecosystem. Its first appearance was hand in hand with search platforms, specifically the Archie search engine, which worked like current search engines and allowed companies to track customer information.”

At that time, the use of email was already beginning to be popular, which led brands to see emails as a useful means to get their messages directly to the mailbox of their target audience. This came to be the digital version of the classic campaigns of mailbox and traditional mailing.

The first banners also began to appear simultaneously, advertisements on websites that imitated the spaces that brands occupied in paper publications. This, despite being one of the first formats of digital marketing, is still fully valid 30 years later. Advancing in this decade, search engines such as Google or Yahoo, continued to promote digital marketing. In contrast, SEO (search engine optimization) was born to try to take advantage of the visibility given by search results.

“SEO is one of the most important tools within digital marketing, and seeks to optimize the positioning of websites in search engines such as Google, through techniques to improve the performance of the web, on-page positioning factors or links received from external websites, among others,” states Zuñiga.

With the growing importance of digital marketing and its relationship with search engines and content on the Internet, Google took a step forward with various tools developed especially for the management of these strategies.
In this way, we find different products from the Mountain View giant, such as Google AdSense, Analytics, Adwords, Keyword planner and others. These various tools have helped to consolidate digital marketing as an indispensable aspect for companies. Helping to control the different marketing strategies, either through email, search engines, advertisements and SMS.

The penetration of digital media in recent years has been exponential, to the point that many aspects of our day-to-day are developed within this ecosystem. This situation has also given a particular boost to digital marketing strategies, incorporating new variables such as social networks, whose great references, such as Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, or Twitter, were born in the early 2000s.

Digital users spend a large part of their time connected within these interaction platforms. Therefore, integrating them into digital marketing meant an expansion in it, which gave way to new trends and strategies. An example of this is influencer marketing, which takes advantage of the communities formed by content creators on social networks to promote products or services and interact with consumers.

Another aspect that has had a great growth in recent years has been marketing through live broadcasts or streaming. This has also had a particular acceptance in the eCommerce landscape, especially in the Asian market, through live stream commerce.