The need for ‘evolved phygital’: Ramping up the experience

Little did marketers - or anyone else for that matter - realise that it would take a pandemic to turn our well established retail infrastructure on its head. Almost overnight social commerce became our new form of retail architecture. What was already prevalent in China took hold in a matter of months and continues to gain momentum in the West.

Of course, even prior to 2020 the tech was available for marketers to mesh live-streaming, short-form video and social-networking to show...

15 March 2021 | Advertising

Forget headless: Why agile CMS delivers the goods for marketing teams

Brands are trying to keep pace with new technologies and trends and even the terms that are adopted to describe them. ‘Agile CMS’ has recently been coined by Forrester, and it sounds great, but what does it mean in practice?

Disparate content systems rife with duplications and impossible to search cause delays and difficulties in enterprises today. Headless CMS, which separates frontend experiences from the backend content repository and management, had potential, but failed...

9 March 2021 | Commerce

How Covid-19 is changing retail KPIs: From traffic to engagement

Traffic. It’s what almost all retailers swore by — that, and time spent in stores. The logic was simple: Get people through the doors and entice them to linger longer, and they’d buy your wares. All that came into question when Covid-19 hit. Even after the shutdowns were lifted, retailers found themselves facing a new reality: Traffic looked (and still looks) nothing like it did the year prior.

Almost overnight, consumers were utilising convenient services such as buy...

4 March 2021 | Branding

How much has consumer behaviour changed in the past year – and how can marketers adapt?

There is no doubt that, in the past year, changes to consumer behaviour have occurred faster and more extreme than ever before. Digital adoption has skyrocketed as consumers and brands alike responded to the new demands of lockdowns and social distancing. That’s bought with it new expectations for shopping, customer service and marketing that will stick around long after the pandemic ends.

It’s critical now that brands are adapting their messaging, strategy and priorities for...

1 March 2021 | Branding

How online food businesses can enhance digital customer experience post-Covid-19

Due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, rates of online grocery and takeout orders have doubled as many parts of the world have suspended or reduced movement to curb the spread of the virus.

Given the current state of the world, now seems like a good time to start an online food business. At the same time, such a business isn’t guaranteed to succeed just because of the pandemic but is dependent on other factors, one of which is the digital customer experience.

The digital...

24 February 2021 | Commerce

The business case for a strong CMO-CIO partnership: A guide

Digital transformation has been a trending topic in the business world for several years, but out of necessity, efforts to upgrade digital capabilities accelerated sharply in 2020. With social distancing measures in place, millions of office workers tackling their workload from home, and consumers and business buyers researching products and making purchases online, companies had little choice.

Digital marketing accounted for more than half of ad spending in 2020 for the first...

4 February 2021 | CMO

It’s time to stop wasting marketing spend and start using uplift models

In today’s saturated consumer landscape, the marketing teams that win are the ones that earnestly ask what each customer wants, and relentlessly use data to find the answers. In recent years, analytics and predictive models have enabled forward-thinking marketers to get ahead. But as these techniques get more ubiquitous, the competition is catching up. So what’s next for marketing teams on the cutting-edge?

At Vidora, we believe that uplift modeling is the next big frontier...

27 January 2021 | Commerce

Direct-to-consumer (DTC): Why consumer brands need to make the economics feasible

Consumer brands seek to establish direct relations with end customers for a range of reasons: to generate deeper insights about consumer needs, to maintain control over their brand experience, and to differentiate their proposition to consumers. Increasingly, they also do it to drive sales.

While some brands have considered establishing a direct-to-consumer (DTC) channel in the past, they’ve often decided against it. However, now is the time to reconsider as Covid-19 has...

25 January 2021 | Advertising

The future of shopping and eCommerce: Perspective from Pinterest

I joined Pinterest in the height of the global pandemic. From my home office and virtual landscape, I’ve spent the past six months scaling our advertising business in the UK and Ireland, as well as working thoughtfully to ensure that Pinners in these countries have a personalised, meaningful experience on Pinterest to help them create a life they love. While I didn’t anticipate that my first day would involve meeting my new colleagues via video calls, I have gained invaluable...

20 January 2021 | Commerce

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