Marketing has never been the same, since the introduction of the first online banner, that appeared on the World Wide Web in 1994. Fast forward to 2023, LinkedIn boasts that Digital Marketers are some of the most sought after skills in Australia. In this article we’ll do a deep dive into the history of the Digital Marketing job sector in Australia, how the market has evolved and the necessary skills you need to think about, in order to succeed into the future.
Australia’s Digital Marketing Job Evolution – A Brief history
While traditional marketing had existed for decades as a formal business discipline, it was inevitable that an online technique would emerge with the rise of the internet. Focusing on Marketing sectors that specialized in Advertising and Media Buying, the first Digital Marketing roles emerged in Australia in the mid 90s, restricted to a number of large advertising agencies (The Brand Agency, McCann, Oglivy & Leo Burnett) & large corporates (Westpac, General Motors Holden, Woolworths, Colgate, & Macquarie Bank). EDM was soon to follow, with mail order subscription systems that saw the natural, cost reduced transition to E-mail subscriptions, as well as cold email marketing. This was before the days of modern spam rules and registers.
Digital Marketers, more often referred to during this period as ‘Online Marketers’ or ‘Web Marketers’, focused creative content creation, basic front end coding skills, email campaign generation, working with emerging online CRM systems and the precursor to modern UX/UI design. While Social Media was non-existent to (at best) used by a small fringe of online users, another sector of Online Marketing looked at the digital forefathers of modern social media. These Online Marketers would pay to have their logos/banners/links advertised within certain interactive spaces, such as large chat rooms, Geo City web rings, and other online niche spaces.
The late 1990s and early 2000s saw a further evolution in the Digital Marketing industry in Australia, with the explosive popularity of search engines. While it was still too early to pick Google as the defacto monopoly in Australia in the late 1990s, SEO techniques began to emerge for Google, Yahoo & Ask Jeeves, with less attention paid to AOL, as in the US. By 2000, Google’s virtual 2 decade monopoly was becoming more apparent, which then led to SEM/Paid Advertising which naturally followed in that year, with the creation of Google AdWords. Now began the rush to raise multiple campaigns and the first “landing pages”, to see which campaign would warrant the most investment.
The introduction of mainstream blogging for everyday people also complimented the SEO content being produced, with Aussie Digital Marketers looking to ‘go viral’, a recently coined term of the time, to help attract potential customers and raise brand awareness.
The next evolutionary phase was the mainstreaming of Social Media. While Social Media existed in Australia prior to Facebook (Bebo, MySpace etc) they never became a staple in the Australian Digital Marketing job description, unlike in America where such early attempts to connecting brands with customers took place, potentially because of the early release of Facebook on US university campuses. By the mid to late 2000s, social media, both paid and organic, was an emerging field in Digital Marketing in the country, which saw rapid growth in the coming years.
Where is Digital Marketing Heading and how you can prepare
With the Spam Act of 2003, some predicted the end of EDM, while others predicted the social media fad would slowly disappear. As history has shown, all the major Digital Marketing disciplines that have been introduced, have never really gone away. While the channel or platform may change, the methodology and outreach remains a staple on many digital marketing job descriptions.
While in our next article, we’ll provide advice on the highest in demand skills for Digital Marketers, but in this article, we’ll summarize some important lessons to learn from the history of Digital Marketing:
- Specialized vs Pan-Skilled: As there are more and more digital marketing skills in demand, and many previous skills never seem to go away, we’ve seen the growing trend of specialized digital marketing professionals (eg; SEO specialists, who just do SEO). Some important consideration needs to be made early in to your career if you want to specialize or be a jack of all trades. In short, both are here to stay and provide lucrative careers, so it’s about what you want to do and the organisations you want to work for.
- Social Media Trends: It’s important to understand that going viral and actually selling are 2 different things. We’ve seen many platforms come and go, but it’s important to understand that while the platform may change (for example, Myspace Facebook), the actual core skill set is easily transferable. If you saw the writing on the wall for Google + at its peak just a few years ago, we still encourage you to learn, as many of those skills could easily be transferred to the next big thing (such as Snapchat for TikTok)
- Traditional Marketing: Some predicted that Digital Marketing would replace Traditional Marketing. The truth is, some types of marketing are more appropriate for certain industries, and for many, both traditional marketing and Digital marketing are very complimentary. We encourage digital marketers to embrace and learn about traditional marketing, as they are still great ways to connect with customers.
- Be ontop of the Tech: It’s easy to find articles saying the Metaverse has been a dead start, but while that specific iteration or platform may not be successful, there could be other more successful platforms, or a rebound in explosive popularity in pioneering brands. The same can be said for AI, be sure to embrace and learn how to use the platforms, rather than pas them off as a fad. Similar to our point 2 on social media, embrace new technologies, because even if they aren’t initially successful, the transferable skills could be a worthy investment for the next big platform.
