10 practical ways to grow your local business with digital marketing in 2021

Digital marketing for local business is quite different from how to do marketing for a national or global business.

Yes, we mostly use the same channels - but, in a different fashion.

Local businesses target local people, who are geographically around. They may seem easier to reach without digital marketing; however, it's been long since consumers started searching online before they buy basically anything.

More than 90% of users searched for local businesses...

4 February 2021 | Advertising

How to determine brand readiness for influencer marketing

Influencer marketing is no longer an unfamiliar territory. The industry is projected to be a $15 billion global industry by 2022, up from $8 billion in 2019. It’s no surprise then that CMOs continue to emphasise influencer marketing strategies in their plans.

74% of CMOs surveyed in the 2019-2020 Gartner CMO Spend Survey planned to increase their social marketing (including influencer marketing) spending while 65% planned to roll out full or pilot influencer campaigns, with an...

3 February 2021 | Content Marketing

How to write marketing emails for pandemic-era prospects in 2021: A guide

By now, you’ve likely heard that people are spending more time online. This isn’t a surprise, considering how quarantine and social distancing restrictions have affected everyone’s lifestyles. However, as a New York Times analysis revealed, people aren’t necessarily visiting the same websites they frequented before COVID-19 swept the globe.

While established media brands and streaming websites saw significant increases in traffic, many other URLs took hits as people’s...

2 February 2021 | Content Marketing

Sara McCorquodale, CEO, CORQ: On influencer and brand relationships and Gen Z/millennial priorities

Influencer marketing is a catchy, catch-all buzzword - but for a term so vast, it has a litany of caveats attached to it.

Right now, in these uncertain Covid times, the word has a certain stigma - especially referring to those who are jetting off to conduct 'essential work' when so many are unable to travel. PR Week dubbed it the Dubai dilemma. Yet this undercuts the work many others are doing with far lower budget and scope.

Since the first brands caught on to the...

28 January 2021 | Content Marketing

Influence: How Social Media Influencers Are Shaping Our Digital Future book extract: On ‘influencer legitimacy’

In this exclusive extract from Sara McCorquodale's book 'Influence: How social media influencers are shaping our digital future', McCorquodale explores her path to working with influencers and setting up her agency, CORQ, as well as the relationship between brands and influencers.

The questions that had started to form in my head were these: do we have any reason to believe people with large social audiences have the power to influence their audiences beyond their number of...

22 January 2021 | Content Marketing

Digital, content and social roles on the rise in 2021, says LinkedIn

eCommerce personnel, digital content professionals and creative freelancers are expected to be among the fastest growing jobs in the UK in 2021, according to new data from LinkedIn.

The figures appear in LinkedIn's 'Jobs on the Rise' report, which analysed sectors with the highest year on year growth rates in hiring between April and October 2020.

Covid-19 has naturally played a major role in determining which roles are most sought after. In terms of eCommerce, which was...

18 January 2021 | Commerce

Understanding the importance of authenticity in corporate social activism

Over the past few years we’ve witnessed a striking shift in how brands communicate their identity, values and humanity. While companies traditionally avoid taking a public stance on social and political discourse, it seems that more and more brands are choosing to break this mould.

While some chalk up this change to progress, there are countless critics of corporate social activism that argue that brands’ motivations are neither altruistic nor pure. And certainly, when brands...

18 January 2021 | Content Marketing

Marketing predictions for 2021: Will your business sink or swim?

2020 burned hot, with global upheaval from every angle, culminating in an ongoing health crisis that halted the world, challenged communities, and strained economies. The economic future looks perilous, with 2020 expecting to set records for the highest number of retail bankruptcies and individual store closures in a single year. Holiday spending, typically a reliable boost for retail businesses, is expected to be down some 22 to 25% and total U.S. retail sales may see a 10.5%...

15 January 2021 | Best Practice

Brands need to utilise user-generated content – but only with a safe, scalable process in place

Just how much user-generated content (UGC) is out there right now? As of May 2019, more than 500 hours of video were uploaded to YouTube every minute; more than a billion hours of all those videos get watched every day. Facebook has more than 2.7 billion monthly active users, the vast majority of whom post and share family pics, jokes and memes.

There’s probably no way to measure all the content going up every second of every day on Amazon reviews, question-answer databases,...

8 January 2021 | Commerce

MarketingTech 2020 review: Covid-19, CMO strategy, and compassion

How tough was 2020 for marketers amid a global pandemic? In many ways, it depended on your industry. But navigating Covid-19 was a struggle for all.

It was okay to not be okay at times, with the knowledge that 2021 will - all being well - improve, and the knowledge of the marketing best practices which emerged over 2020. As Scott Brinker put it to this publication in December: "This is stressful, but you're not alone. Everyone's in the same boat, so that makes it a little bit...

4 January 2021 | Best Practice