Best Free Online Marketing Guide For Online Entrepreneur

The disruption of the Covid-19 epidemic could actually present retailers with long-term opportunities, as it has forced them to hasten their journey towards a genuine omni-channel approach and speed up the personalisation of their digital channels. Those are the main conclusions of Retail Rebound - a panel sponsored by Criteo - at The Drum’s Digital Summit and involving lively conversation between Specsavers’ marketing and e-commerce director, Chris Carter, and Criteo’s UK country manager, Marc Ó Fathaigh. They discussed the need to be genuinely agile and operate at unprecedented speeds while acknowledging that a host of new competitors have now entered the retail space. Watch the full panel session here For the first time ever, over 30% of all UK commerce will be digital this year, compared to 21% in 2019. This, according to Carter, means all marketers now have to think omni-channel – not just digital marketers. The biggest shift in focus this approach requires is how to identify ...

As the UK government puts betting advertising under the microscope, the English Football League has leaped to the defence of the bookies, highlighting the importance of their sponsorships to clubs in the wake of ongoing financial troubles. Ged Colleypriest, founder of Underdog Sports Marketing, examines if football can cope with having the punting pound removed from its economy. This can’t be in doubt any longer. The question mark is actually over how big the problem might be. Research commissioned by GambleAware earlier this year suggested that 1.4 million people were problem gamblers . Some experts were quick to query the number, but there is more than enough evidence to show that there is significant concern. With football’s incredibly close relationship with gambling, how might the industry be able to navigate the double hit of Covid-19 and tightening gambling restrictions? Self-regulation isn’t enough Much has been spoken about the ‘responsible gambling’ messaging that has beco...

Consumer behaviours have dramatically changed over the past few months – and brands and marketers are scrambling to respond. Simon Long, creative director at IMA, believes that agencies need to creative strategies that can change as fast as trends do. Someone much smarter than me once said  ‘ there are decades where nothing happens and there are weeks where decades happen’ – this feels like such a time. In the past few months, COVID-19 has ground the world to a halt. But accelerated marketing, taking it down roads that have not been ventured before. Whilst there’s a need to tread carefully, we need to break new ground. Looking ahead. Forming a vision of the future. Informed by the changes we’re seeing. People won’t behave as they did before. Brands shouldn’t either. They need to think andact differently. Evolving to meet the shifts in consumer behaviour, buying and content consumption habits. This presents a unique opportunity. To rethink the way we work. To truly reflect ...

You may not be anywhere near the office water cooler right now, but we still want to spotlight the most talked about creative from the brands that should be on your radar. Today, we’re talking about Singapore-based grocery giant NTUC FairPrice’s Christmas campaign. FairPrice has launched its Christmas campaign based around five characters and their journey to creating a Christmas meal.  Tapping on influencers from YouTube channel Wah!Banana, each of the five characters are based a Christmas shopping archetype. There is ‘The Merry Maker’, an organiser, ‘The Classic Buddy’ who loves Christmas food, ‘The Easygoing Pal’ nonplussed about celebrating Christmas, ‘The Super Local’ who loves local food and ‘The Trends Guru’ tuned to the latest trends. Lynn Chong, deputy director for channel marketing for FairPrice’s retail business, noted that shopping for Christmas dinner is one of the highlights of the festive season and as such it was the perfect moment to showcase all...

30-second summary: Account-based marketing (ABM) has been an excellent strategy for creating more personalized marketing efforts, but it’s time to move beyond this to create more cohesion across teams. Departments across a business should all be aligned on the customer journey. Account-based everything (ABX) ditches the siloed approach and helps align departments, identify and sync tactics, and segment personalization efforts. ABX opens internal communication lines between departments to ensure consistency when interacting with a customer and make for a more personalized connection at every touchpoint, regardless of the team members involved. Account-based marketing (ABM) isn’t the new kid on the block anymore. Today, over 80% of B2B organizations say they use an ABM model . Then, 2020 happened — and ABM is no longer enough by itself. Account-based strategies can’t stop once an account is closed-won. B2B marketing and sales professionals are facing many challenges this year, ...

30-second summary: This article will look into the benefits of Augmented Reality (AR) content experiences, specifically in the retail sector: It will define and explain the value of WebAR versus app-based AR experiences – both for the consumer and brands Dive deeper into holographic WebAR, with examples Educate on how to unearth the value of WebAR for your business and how to go about putting an AR strategy in place Finally, it will touch on the future of this new content medium for marketers and advertisers. Competition for consumer attention is fiercer than ever. Experts suggest that the average consumer is fielding 4,000 to 10,000 ads per day . In today’s attention economy, brands are spending millions of dollars on marketing and ad communications strategies to stand out amongst the sea of digital content that floods consumer’s devices. But the harsh reality is that still so many brands go unnoticed. So how do brands cut through the noise and deliver memorable messages tha...

Once confined to startups and incubator labs, in recent years the burgeoning vegan market has piqued interest from big brands like PepsiCo, M&S and Unilever, with the latter recently announcing a colossal £1bn sales target for 2025. But how are brands ensuring their investments bear fruit? It’s 2070, and the whole world lives as herbivores, filled with nothing but distaste for its chewy past. Gloucester’s cheese rolling has been called off indefinitely; Easter eggs have been renamed and pit roasts, butcher knives and meat tenderisers now reside as artefacts in the Design Museum, fossils of society’s bloodthirsty past. Ok, admittedly that forecast goes a stretch too far, but when you consider how much things have changed since 1970, you see where I’m going. In the past decade, what was once a fringe movement has found its stride, particularly within metropolitan hubs where you’ll find city dwellers queuing around corners just so they can gorge on some sweet seitan shawarmas fr...

As part of our new series in partnership with The Marketing Society, this month we hear from Robert Simons, head of partner and developer marketing, International Markets and member of The Marketing Society Asia. The global work-from-home experiment has rewritten the productivity playbook forever. Working from home or living at work? Thriving, or simply trying to survive? The ever-present ping-ping-ping of notifications. Or was that the microwave? Welcome to life from the home office.  By now and, some seven+ months in, the thrill of having traded in the office commute for a few short steps to the desk has long worn off. Instead replaced with the seismic reality that, for many of us, life in the home office is here to stay. Faced with fewer (if any) face to face meetings with colleagues (masks on, please), the overnight evaporation of casual corridor conversations, and what were once interactive workshops now reduced to sharing screens, it’s clear a different approach to the...

30-second summary: 2020 has given consumers and brands the most digital-first holiday shopping season. Consumers are making buying decisions in the “messy middle” stages – namely, exploration and evaluation. “Cheapest” vs “best”, what’s winning consumers’ search worldwide? If you’re still looking for ways to finetune your holiday season digital strategy, we’re sharing insights about just the missing pieces. This week we’re going for a strategy-heavy look at the crucial phases that influence your consumers’ buying decisions and how you can slam dunk sales by bumping up your digital marketing strategy to resonate through sales. 2020 consumers and brands have seen the most digital-first holiday shopping season and consumers are making buying decisions in the “messy middle” stages – namely, exploration and evaluation.  According to Google’s behavioral science analysis, despite the global economic pressure, people aren’t interested in the “cheapest” products/services. The gra...

In the early days of the California gold rush, prospectors had it easy. Stories circulated of vast fortunes being made overnight, with huge quantities of gold lying in rivers just waiting to be discovered. By the mid-1850s, of course, the easy pickings had long gone, and miners had to go through backbreaking work for diminishing returns.  Something not too dissimilar is happening now to the digital advertising industry. The industry is at something of an inflection point. Behind us are the ’gold rush’ years of the industry. Thanks to cookies and mobile advertising IDs, publishers and advertisers have been saturated with data. Meanwhile, the adtech industry has evolved rapidly and created an ecosystem that can serve perfectly personalised content to individuals in real-time. The model is so accurate in targeting people that some are even convinced that the big tech companies are secretly listening to us through our phones. Ahead of us lies a new, privacy-first industry, where dat...

As the coronavirus continues to reshape our home lives, Nextdoor's Paps Shaikh says it's time for marketers to reappraise the power of local advertising. It has never been more critical to connect with customers right where they are. We are now all living more locally as consumer behaviour and mood has shifted so dramatically and so quickly. So how do advertisers and media planners successfully respond to this change? Media planning is out of step and out of time. Often denigrated as the bottom of the barrel – due to antiquated ways to activate along this channel – local advertising should be the hero part of a marketing strategy. This is particularly true as the pandemic spikes postcode by postcode, putting community advertising to the forefront of any media campaign. Think globally – but act locally Advertisers and agencies must turn conventional thinking on its head. Often the approach is to buy ad space from premium publishers to deliver targeted and tailored messages a...

This year, a cohort of brands are eschewing Black Friday and rejecting the hyper-consumerism of the annual bargain bonanza to instead highlight the climate crisis and offer social commentary . Here, The Drum explores the best creative responses to the growing anti-Black Friday movement. Ah, Black Friday. Each year it rolls around, bringing with it bumper sales from retailers, seemingly unmissable discounts from big brands and images of people fighting over TVs in Walmart and  Asda . However, in 2020 the annual pre-Christmas bargain bonanza looks a little different. With growing concerns about brands' role in the climate crisis and the impact of hyper-consumerism, some advertisers are rejecting the retail holiday entirely and asking customers not to spend money with them.  Scroll down to take a look at the best anti-Black Friday campaigns, which are seeing brands harness the power of marketing to make a different kind of impact this season.  Public Fibre 'Buy More Rubb...