The well-known saying “Forewarned is forearmed” is true not only in the military context. In business, comprehensive awareness is also crucial and often drives entrepreneurial growth. New knowledge in management, marketing, science, technology, and innovation is essential for business leaders and top managers in an increasingly competitive and unstable market situation in the country. It helps not only to survive in times of crisis but also to develop and see new perspectives. Such a vast amount of useful, often motivating information—structured, systematized, and universalized—can be obtained from one of the unconventional, so to speak, members of the Ukrainian Association of Furniture Manufacturers: the company Marketer, through its online media about marketing and technologies for business.

Marketer not only promptly provides valuable information to its users but can also teach them how to use it effectively or help business leaders organize training events to improve the qualifications of their employees. Moreover, it can provide entrepreneurs with targeted advertising for their products and services, helping them reach the most interested audience, increase advertising efficiency, and reduce costs.

We discussed all this in more detail with the founder and current head of the company Marketer, Anton Yudin. He explained that, at the beginning of the war, a drop in internet traffic prevented the company’s media resources from delivering the full amount of information they were capable of providing to users. The situation has since improved significantly. An important achievement is also that all the information Marketer works with has been fully and irreversibly Ukrainianized.

– The set of informational, advertising, and PR services has remained practically the same but continues to be refined, as we work in a field where innovations appear almost daily. But now, we do not limit ourselves only to providing such services; we have changed our positioning. Having developed several of our own IT products, we can fully position ourselves not just as a service provider but also as an IT company.

— Are these products of universal application, or are they industry-specific? Which of them could be useful for our industry, specifically furniture companies?

– For furniture makers, we have created and are now promoting a product called EDU-Marketer. This is an educational marketplace that any company with training needs (conducting courses, seminars, or workshops for professional development of staff or onboarding new employees) can use conveniently and effectively. Here, one can easily add an online course, create an event page, gather participants for a webinar, lecture, or master class. Everything is really simple—no complex settings, just a user-friendly interface and full team support.

By the way, this educational platform can also be effectively used by UAFM, which, as is well known, devotes a lot of attention to organizing and holding various training and informational events.

— Practically any improvement has no limits, especially in the field where your company operates. What is a current priority for you now?

– We see the need to maximize the automation of our website and its use. In addition, we are working on raising the quality level of the informational, advertising, and PR materials that clients publish on our online media platforms. To achieve this, we want to introduce a rating system with awards for the best ones. This will benefit companies who, by using the wide opportunities of ‘Marketer’s’ online resources, will promote themselves more effectively, and it will also be beneficial for us due to increased traffic.

— There’s another way to raise the level of content for your media resources—by preparing it yourselves and offering this as a service to clients…

– Yes, we have the journalistic and freelance capacity for this, and our clients know it. Of course, this service—writing high-quality PR cases for clients and then promoting them on our media resources—is a paid one. We already have examples of this kind of work with our clients.

In conclusion, it is worth mentioning that Anton Yudin, as an entrepreneur, is also represented in the Ukrainian Association of Furniture Manufacturers with another of his business projects—Budynok. The portal Budynok.com.ua is a specialized online platform where users can view or post their own listings related to real estate in Kyiv or other regions of Ukraine. For those who want to build their own house based on an individual project, there is an opportunity to purchase the necessary land plot. In addition, options for renting residential and commercial real estate are available.

It is easy to see the logic of how our Association can be useful to a portal connected with real estate: real estate will always need furniture.