Best Free Online Marketing Guide For Online Entrepreneur

It’s that time again, when we look back at the agencies, the brands, the organizations, movements and trends that have shaped the past year. In 2020 – a year so many of us would like to forget – our industry of problem solvers proved time and again that they have what it takes to muck in, help out, ask questions, shape cultures and change the world. It is them that we celebrate in our New Year Honors .   While much of adland is licking its wounds, Sir Martin Sorrell’s S4 Capital has seen sales, profits and headcount soar. S4, which labels itself a tech-led, new age, new era digital advertising and marketing services company, has achieved significant results in its two-and-a-half years of existence. Per November’s Q3 earnings announcement: revenue was up almost 53% to the tune of £86.4m ($113.8m). Gross profit was up 79% to £75.3m ($100.6m). And headcount was up 26% compared to a year earlier – it now has 2,870 employees and is looking to continue to hire aggressively. So, what ...

30-second summary: The shift to online shopping was already well underway pre-pandemic. Consumers are taking advantage of expanded service offerings to get the products. Customers see digital and in-store as two facets of the same experience. People are looking for brands to deliver instantly on the values they believe in. In the absence of historic data, BI and search insights have become critically important. Now that the holiday buying season is well underway, we’re seeing the extent to which the year of the pandemic—and its unusual consumer trends and behavior—is impacting the retail industry. While some of these trends could revert to historic levels post-pandemic, others will likely change retail into 2021 and forever. The shift to online shopping was already well underway pre-pandemic, although no one could have predicted the speed at which adoption would increase over these past months. As digital accounts for an increasing proportion of purchases, retailers are bein...

30-second summary: When Fuze began its ABM journey, the company worked with Demandbase to access rich behavioral and engagement information about its prospects and customers. After building a Target Account Program, Fuze began testing the waters with one-to-one ABM tactics to zero in on enterprise brands. Before long, the challenge became scaling up while finding the right balance of one-to-one programs to one-to-many. Fuze created a pilot approach with best-fit accounts, which resulted in personalized and timely messages to key prospects when they were most active. Demandbase integrations allowed Fuze to pull information together from many different sources and view it in one place, detailing a picture of the company’s prospect and customer activity. While ABM can be slow to get going, running pilot programs, laying the right foundation and focusing on data is essential to long-term success. Many of you may remember the show The Brady Bunch. Apart from my young daughters dre...

It’s that time again, when we look back at the agencies, the brands, the organizations, movements and trends that have shaped the past year. In 2020 – a year so many of us would like to forget – our industry of problem solvers proved time and again that they have what it takes to muck in, help out, ask questions, shape cultures and change the world. It is them that we celebrate in our New Year Honors .   While independent agency Vayner Media is often thought of in the same breath as its famous founder Gary Vaynerchuck, when the company branched out in APAC last year, it did so on its own merit. By the end of 2019, the company had just over 20 staff, helmed by APAC head Avery Akkineni, and it was making a steady but respectable pace in previously uncharted Asia via its first office in Singapore. At the end of 2020 – a year in which many businesses were reducing headcount – the Vayner Media APAC business had over 115 staffers on its books, showing a significant period of growth ove...

It’s that time again, when we look back at the agencies, the brands, the organizations, movements and trends that have shaped the past year. In 2020 – a year so many of us would like to forget – our industry of problem solvers proved time and again that they have what it takes to muck in, help out, ask questions, shape cultures and change the world. It is them that we celebrate in our New Year Honors .   2020 was a big year for leading condom brand Durex as it positioned itself as an activist against a variety of sexual taboos and stigmas. Previously a mainstay of cheesy TV ads, inappropriate billboards and celebrity tie-ups (does anyone else remember the JLS condoms of the 00s?), the 91-year-old business overhauled its brand at the start of the year. The aim? To showcase the positive reality of modern-day sex and called for a ‘new normal’ – long before that phrase found its way into popular discourse . Since then, all its global marketing activity has been conducted with Havas...

2020 has been an education for all of us. So as we approach the end of a year like no other, we’re asking media and marketing luminaries to share with us their biggest work lessons of the last 12 months. Here,  Jeremy Hine, chief executive of MullenLowe Group UK, talks about survival, duty of care and most importantly, collaboration.  2020 has been defined by one event: the Covid-19 pandemic. Long-held preconceptions have been challenged and we have all been forced to look at our day to day lives through a new lens. The pandemic and its effects have completely changed how we connect with one another and how we live our lives. For agencies, it has also forced businesses to rethink. Marketers have had to find new ways to produce creative results while working remotely. We have also had to overcome industry-wide difficulties such as the fall in ad spend following the virus. According to WARC, ad spend is forecasted to fall by £4bn in 2020. Year on year growth is not expect...

30-second summary: Marketers have been forced to recreate their playbooks, almost on a weekly basis in 2020. Remote work is here to stay, but so is a return to office culture. B2B marketers can launch thoughtful campaigns that recognize the emotions of workers related to both of these shifts. The future of online, virtual events is still being written, but one thing is certain: they’ll keep getting better and better. It’s not too early to plan for 2022—those plans might end up having to change too, but marketing teams need to look to 2022 as a period for potential, massive growth. Somehow, perhaps magically, we are almost to the end of 2020. I know that I will look back in a year, five years, and ten years with the perspective of time and hindsight, but right now I feel as if this year was the most momentous of my lifetime. From a personal perspective, I learned anew about the power of patience and the sanctity of home and family. As a marketing professional, I was forced to e...

30-second summary: With the arrival of digital, marketers genuinely believed they would suddenly get to know their customers even better than before. Data analytics was hailed as a panacea for modern marketers, supposedly removing all the niggling blind spots in the customer journey. Despite the fact that the average marketing team now uses a whopping 91 different martech tools, your customers’ behavior will still constantly surprise you. And because humans, by nature, are complicated souls who don’t conform, digital marketers are still getting it wrong. Identifying buyer personas is often a core part of a solid marketing strategy. Yet, talking and listening to customers is increasingly being overlooked when it comes to the techniques being employed to learn more about target audiences. For businesses where the phone is a conversion point, this provides an opportunity to really listen, and analyze, what is happening on those calls. The latest and most sophisticated technology on ...

It’s that time again, when we look back at the agencies, the brands, the organizations, movements and trends that have shaped the past year. In 2020 – a year so many of us would like to forget – our industry of problem solvers proved time and again that they have what it takes to muck in, help out, ask questions, shape cultures and change the world. It is them that we celebrate in our  New Year Honors . A year ago, few would have believed it if we said email was going to be the hot new niche in media. Of course, we made no such prediction. Because that would have seemed silly. But with the pandemic driving media titles to reassess their utility to readers in lockdown, email media staple Morning Brew has been making a name for itself. It enjoyed a buy-out from Insider Group, valued at $75m, and rode (or caused) a wave of people to realize that the best place to catch business professionals is in their inboxes rather than across Google or on social media. So how did the company b...

As we get ready to shake the dust off 2020, The Drum is rounding up some of the key stories, interviews and work that have shaped the year. As a new (hopefully better) year beckons, The Drum looks back behind-the-scenes at the campaigns that found strength in 2020’s disruption. While a picture is worth a thousand words, behind every ad is a complete leather-bound book that tells a tale from idea generation to implementation, covering production perils and creative breakthroughs. A story that rarely gets told is that behind-the-scenes this year, advertisers have had to grapple with how to produce award-worthy creative safely while a raging pandemic runs rampant. So what happens when Covid-19 shuts down your big Mediterranean shoot mere weeks before filming? Could we survive without overhead shots of tyres carving tracks in the dirt, asked the Skoda team as it endeavoured to advertise its SUV range. Yes, it could, with the team  turned to CGI to recreate the ad they’d planned...

It’s that time again, when we look back at the agencies, the brands, the organizations, movements and trends that have shaped the past year. In 2020 – a year so many of us would like to forget – our industry of problem solvers proved time and again that they have what it takes to muck in, help out, ask questions, shape cultures and change the world. It is them that we celebrate in our New Year Honors .   The Covid-19 pandemic has decimated the tourism industry and recovery will take time as mass international travel will not return in any significant way any time soon. The pandemic has also irrevocably changed consumer behavior and spending patterns. This means it is crucial that countries like Singapore work closely with its partner agencies and the industry to chart a new path forward for tourism, by transforming its businesses and building new capabilities. These efforts have so far included helping dance club Zouk Singapore engage its fans by introducing its digital initiat...

Martin Lambie-Nairn, the acclaimed designer behind BBC and Channel 4 idents, died aged 75 on Christmas day. Tributes have poured in from media and marketing colleagues, as well as the companies his unmistakable designs brought to life, to mark the passing of a man who helped "shape the public consciousness". The designer was behind some of the most recognisable visuals in UK TV including Channel 4’s original block idents which persist to this day and key identifiers for BBC channels that many remember fondly. His eponymous agency also developed the bubble branding for O2. He founded celebrated branding business Lambie-Nairn in 1990 before selling it in 1999 to WPP, which would later  merge it into the new branding behemoth Superunion. A statement from his branding agency ML-N said: "In a career spanning five decades, Martin was widely acknowledged as one of the leading graphic designers and creative directors of his generation.” He also helped create, conceive and ba...

30-second summary: Q5 is the time right after the holiday splurge when consumers are considered to lay low. However, people are shopping, just with a slightly different mindset. The beginning of the year brings many opportunities for brands to reach and connect with consumers who are shopping with “new year, new me” in mind. This year on Singles Day, which takes place in October, ecommerce cost per mille (CPM) increased by over a third compared to 2019 – a 36% YoY increase to be exact. Ecommerce CPM rates have been on a sharp rise since August and back-to-school season, indicating a more competitive holiday shopping season than year’s past. Cost per mille (CPM) rates start declining in the end of December (when shipping cut-offs hit). Brands can enjoy lower CPMs most of January, opening plenty of opportunities to start the year strong. This year has been a whirlwind to say the least. While we’re not entirely out of the woods yet, 2021 brings promise and hope. Especially for ma...

30-second summary: The alignment between B2B marketing and event marketing has evolved, and event software finally has the capabilities to bridge intent data, engagement and action. By using intent data to drive engagement and action, event marketers can directly impact larger company goals, such as customer delight, retention, upselling or first time sales. Event software can integrate with a business’ CRM, marketing automation and ABM solutions, enabling event marketers to work hand-in-hand with the rest of their marketing team and revenue folks to drive the same shared outcomes. Events are no longer one-off campaigns; event and B2B marketers are poised for 2021 to be the start of their journey as a united revenue engine. For a long time, event marketing meant one thing: marketing events. But just as the story of B2B marketing as a whole has progressed and arced over the last decade, so has event marketing. And finally, the two worlds have collided. It’s about time – and it’...

It’s that time again, when we look back at the agencies, the brands, the organizations, movements and trends that have shaped the past year. In 2020 – a year so many of us would like to forget – our industry of problem solvers proved time and again that they have what it takes to muck in, help out, ask questions, shape cultures and change the world. It is them that we celebrate in our New Year Honors .   In November, while Nestlé was announcing to the world that it had bought a majority stake in Mindful Chef, Gousto was busy achieving tech unicorn status and more than a few commentators were left eating their words. Rather than the flash-in-the-pan they’d previously been considered, here were recipe box brands proving they could actually turn a profit, and that there really was demand enough to sustain and scale a HelloFresh as well as a Blue Apron, a Green Chef, a Purple Carrot and countless more. Turns out, all it took was a pandemic. Well, not all it took, but it certainly h...

It’s that time again, when we look back at the agencies, the brands, the organizations, movements and trends that have shaped the past year. In 2020 – a year so many of us would like to forget – our industry of problem solvers proved time and again that they have what it takes to muck in, help out, ask questions, shape cultures and change the world. It is them that we celebrate in our New Year Honors .   Was there anything more pervasive in 2020 than the Ocean Spray/Fleetwood Mac viral video? Well, here’s a lesser-known fact: the ’It Starts on TikTok’ global campaign was started by the fledgling agency Known. The campaign that leveraged that viral moment – and many more – has generated more than 4bn impressions. Still, the bedrock of the effort was more than just capturing lightning in an Ocean Spray bottle. The campaign began with the deployment Known’s PhD data science and strategy teams to conduct the agency’s most ambitious audience research and segmentation project to date....

“A large part of the Year 2020 went into co-creating the next normal on the back of the great flight to digital, emergence of the home as the multifunctional hub and overall focus on value and humanization of experience,” says Sumit Virmani, Infosys India’s chief marketing officer. Virmani looks ahead at the future which would be a smart combination of some meaningful acceleration of ‘marketing truths’ that have stood the test of time, along with a healthy dose of resourcefulness.    As the world toggles between relaxing and reinforcing pandemic-induced restrictions, businesses and consumers have been co-creating the next normal. The great flight to digital, emergence of the home as the multifunctional hub and overall focus on value and humanization of experience, which characterizes our altered reality today, will likely influence our choices and behaviour long after the pandemic has been tamed. Marketers will need to think hard and also differently about what consumers – ...

30-second summary: Retail has split more than ever before as the trend shifts to a more even 50-50 ecommerce and offline sales ratio Ecommerce took a diversified approach to marketplaces and advertising avenues Social selling moved from a “want to have” to a “need to have” proving itself more valuable than with influencers alone – with almost every social platform providing an online marketplace Going local is the mantra helping local businesses wherever you are in the world Sellers with an online and offline approach sustained growth COVID-19 stole the show because of its massive impact across the globe. Focusing on retail and ecommerce, in particular, there were monumental shifts that led us into innovation and growth in the next year. I would also refer to these as the cardinal rules to survive in ecommerce in 2021. Brick and mortars need to react fast In January 2020, it was business as usual. By the end of the quarter, retail was turned on its head. Humble items that ...