Digital Marketing News;
Alibaba has signed a deal to ease the trade and shipping of goods between China and nearby Malaysia.
The deal will primarily assist in the creation of an improved infrastructure, which would involve the formation of a fulfilment centre.
Discussions have also been held between Alibaba and the Malaysian government, according to Alibaba’s chief executive Daniel Zhang, who said that the aim was to ensure better trade terms for participants in the trade deal.
The deal makes it clear that Alibaba is looking to create a borderless global trade environment, easing the way in which small and medium sized businesses can trade internationally.
The move comes some months after Alibaba’s founder Jack Ma said that enabling global trade was the way forward for retailers around the world.
Malaysia is the first country to sign such a deal, that would bring benefits such as low import duties and faster customs clearance, and a second country is expected to follow soon.
After testing since November 2016, Instagram has announced the widespread release of its shopping feature.
The feature, named Instagram Shopping, allows users to view information on a ‘shoppable’ item that has been posted as an image on the platform.
This will include the price and a button that will take the user to the retailer’s site.
Also launched was a tool allowing normal users to post an image with its own shop button.
Instagram is currently working with large retail brands in order to increase the new feature’s profile. These brands have been reported to include Macy’s and Shopify.
Social media is proving to be an important part of Vietnamese marketing campaigns.
According to a survey from the Vietnam Ecommerce Association, 46% of businesses said that social networks were a highly effective marketing platform, with just 9% saying that the effectiveness was “low”.
This ranked slightly better than search engines in the country, where 44% ranked search as highly effective in a campaign.
Meanwhile, online news sites fell well back, with just 20% saying they found such sites to bring success, whilst mobile apps were also unpopular.
The percentage of businesses using search engines as a marketing channel also fell in the country between 2015 and 2016, from 47% to 41%, whilst email climbed from 29% to 36%.
Naver has announced that it is to expand its portfolio and invest in several new areas of online media.
The South Korean tech company recently said that it had invested around 100 billion won, or 88 million US dollars, in YG Entertainment. The move will see Naver expand its media content through the production of video and music.
YG said that the new deal would ensure that its own content would now become “more approachable through Naver platforms such as V Live, Line, and Snow”.
It was also announced that Naver would be spending 10 billion won on expanding its online encyclopaedia, called Knowledge iN, and plans to work with a range of professionals to ensure that it is as reliable as possible.
Naver said that it saw a “high demand among users for basic science content”, and was looking to create 15,000 new pieces of scientific content with the help of experts.
And finally, the telecoms company AT&T is planning to launch an Internet of Things network for the US and Mexico.
It is already testing a network in the US using LTE-M, an alternative to 4G, and the company says that it plans to expand it in the near future.
AT&T expects the network to be live across the US before mid-2017, after which the company will expand the service across the border into Mexico.
It was also teased that Mexico could be just the first of many cross-border expansions, with AT&T saying that it would soon be making more “announcements with [other] global partners”.