Online Marketing Methods: Are The Old Ones The Best?

If you were to ask my partner about pretty much any band or TV show, he is quite likely to tell you their old work is the best. American TV sitcom Scrubs? “The first few seasons were the best.” Slightly strange and somewhat psychedelic prog-rock band Muse? “I prefer their older stuff.” New Jersey rock band Bon Jovi? “‘Keep The Faith’ beats ‘Have A Nice Day’, hands down.” Which is true, partly because the lyrics of the latter are somewhat questionable - “When the world gets in my face I say have a nice day”? If you say so, Jon.

In some cases, including those three examples, I’d have to agree. Whether it’s because we feel nostalgic for songs from years gone by, or if it’s because the entertainers we know and love really have lost their touch over the years, sometimes it seems like things from years ago are just plain better. For one thing, back when I saw them in 2006 you could pick up a ticket to a Muse gig for around £30 each – they’re closer to £50 now.

But I digress – unfortunately this isn’t my own personal soap box for my thoughts on music. Naturally I’ll be transforming these thoughts into something more useful and less self-indulgent – my point being that we often say “the old ones are the best”, but that doesn’t necessarily hold true when it comes to technology. In fact, is there anything at all in the digital marketing world for which we can say the old methods are the best? In an industry that is ever-changing, is there anything that has stood the test of time? Hop into my virtual DeLorean and I’ll take you back in time to investigate.

Email Newsletters From My Childhood

Email newsletters have been around for many, many years – I remember when our family first got a computer when I was twelve, back in 1999. I signed up for Britney Spears’ newsletter and, being rather young and new to the internet, thought my beloved Britney was emailing me personally. This was back when Alta Vista and Lycos were my go-to search engines, Netscape Navigator was my browser, and the Mindmaze on Encarta Encyclopaedia was the best game ever (until a few months later when I discovered The Sims).

But ten years after Britney’s initial contact, it was confirmed to me that email newsletters actually get pretty bad press. While writing my undergraduate dissertation I found that when customers ranked website features in order of importance, the email newsletter came in last place. Some people still seemed to think of email as annoying spam –too frequent, irrelevant, and often unsolicited. Measures such as the Data Protection act in 1998 and the Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations in 2003 were put in place to protect our inboxes from being inundated with offers of fake Rolex watches and Viagra. But despite this, it has been difficult for email to shake its spammy image over the years.

Now subscribers must opt in to receive emails (some websites operate a double opt-in method for subscribers), email communications can be much more personalised and targeted to their recipients, and buying email lists is a big no-no. This all means that email marketing is in a much better state than it used to be, and its use is far from over.

A Very Brief History of SEO

Back in 1999 there were no social networks – Friends Reunited didn’t make an appearance until summer 2000 – so the options for online marketers were a little more limited than they are now. Yahoo was born in 1995 and Google followed in 1998, but the first ever search engine was Archie. Archie was created in 1990 and it only searched title tags. In those early days, SEO methods were spammy and mostly consisted of keyword stuffing and black-hat tactics, which would prevail for long stretches of time as algorithm updates took months to complete.

Enter Google and its morals, bringing in a more ethical way for webmasters to earn rankings. From there SEO evolved to improve the relevance and personalisation of search results; focus on quality content; consider user locations and devices; and penalise bad practices. SEO has been tamed and trained into a very different animal compared to what it used to be.

The Progression of PPC

In the mid-1990s search engines would sell flat-fee directory listings, but by 2000 the pay-per-click model we used today became the standard, with the top position on results pages being secured by any advertiser willing to pay the most. However this didn’t yield particularly relevant adverts for users, so Google introduced Quality Score to increase the relevance of the ads, and therefore also increase clicks and revenue. So even though PPC has evolved and adapted over the years, the basic premise has been the same for a long time.

The Evolution of Marketers

In short, if the internet hadn’t evolved since 1999, marketers would rely more heavily on email marketing, sending out broadcasts to any email address they could get their hands on, and social media simply wouldn’t exist. We would be buying adverts from search engines at a flat rate, paying more than other companies just to get our ads seen by people who probably wouldn’t be interested in our product. The only way to get to the top of the search engine results pages would be to resort to tactics that make our website look pretty ugly. Companies would be hiding keywords in their websites by giving them the same colour as the page background, and it would be fairly normal to have a page title like this:

Digital Marketing, Internet Marketing, Online Marketing, PPC, Pay Per Click, SEO, Email Marketing, Web Design, Website Design, Web Development Agency

Plus I'd still be listening to Britney Spears. Thank goodness times have changed. The conclusion is that any technology will become a dinosaur if it doesn’t evolve. However, the same tools we have used for years are still extremely relevant, no matter how many times people say “SEO is dead”, “email marketing is dead”, and so on. It’s just that our methods of using them have changed, and will continue to change.

Check back in ten years for a blog post on outdated marketing tactics, and how terrible the internet would be if we kept doing in 2025 what we did in 2015. Perhaps by then Britney will have appeared to me in hologram form.