Global Marketing: Your Complete Online Expansion Strategy
As businesses are growing and breaking the boundaries of their home market, such occurrences must be followed by reinvention, reorganization and new insights about what are the expectations and needs of the international audience in general or, at least, the audience in the targeted part of the world.
Practically, this means that domestic winning strategies, as much as successful they have turned to be, are usually not applicable in international marketing. A profitable recipe in our home market might turn out as a complete failure in another locale.
Luckily, in today’s condition and society, Global marketing can be employed far easily, and be more cost-effective than ever. With popular forms of global digital marketing, success that can be achieved is immeasurable and incomparable to how international business strategies looked just a few decades or even years ago.
The strongest advantages of digital marketing today is being able to provide true insights into the customers’ behavior, to measure results easily and to conduct highly-customized campaigns at scale. Our proclivity to allure more customers in a new locale may find key means in the form of digital marketing which can obtain impeccable planning, appropriately adjusted measures and finally successfully executed strategy. The mentioned strategy can be carried out in the following steps:
- Internationalize your content first in order to open the door to the true goal of this process, which is localization. In other words, internationalization or popularly called “going global” does not refer to designing strategies for “global audience” or customers. Each audience has its own needs and in nuances that are characteristic to that particular locale only.
- Entering any new market will require cultural research and an in-depth notion of the target locale’s market conditions. This includes the purchasing needs, habits and estimation of what new customers would like to be offered or introduced to.
- Culture is more than language. Extraordinary and lucrative campaigns can be implemented and held through a locale only if marketing teams commit themselves to the thorough research of the target culture, its trends, its customs and its cliches, instead of just lazily relying on futile translation regardless how flawless it could be.
- Audience segmentation is inevitable or better said, mandatory, in terms of helping a product or service appear and rank in search engines and fosters a user-centered approach.
Global Social Media Marketing
No matter if the content shared on social media globally is “your own” or it is an international user-generated material distributed via hashtag, this form of marketing brings many benefits. When it comes to hashtag sharing option, the best way to increase your post visibility is to use hashtags in English and thus enable the audience worldwide come across your post particularly when searching for the same key words you previously used.
However, in order to orientate your social media content more towards users, resorting to localization is a recommendable move. In that manner, you avoid excluding foreign customers who might not speak or understand your mother tongue at all, and, possibly, you may benefit in terms of more efficient budget allocation.
On the other side, localization goes far beyond mere language translation or cultural research and brings market trends, regulations, and development-related factors on the stage. The devices in which the majority of customers will access social media websites is a valuable piece of information to be considered, and they vary by region. To put it differently, in some developing regions of the world, there is still a high percentage of 3G users, whereas some are already using 5G. Depending on the technical development and internet conditions of the region, the created and distributed content will be more or less easy to access for the local audience.
What else is possible and likely is that the customers you are targeting in a certain region are not accustomed to the vary same the social media platforms most people are. This is a common phenomenon in huge and promising markets which usually coincides with the large territory of a country. The best example of this situation is probably China. Being one of the few countries with immense population, entering and keeping a steady position there is every entrepreneur’s dream. However, Chinese population is accustomed to their own social media platforms which are counterparts of popular international ones. So, it means the Chinese prefer and use social media platforms like WeChat, Douyin, Youku, Weibo and more. Therefore, if you want to promote your business in China, do not rely on famous social media like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Youtube, etc.
Global Search Engine Marketing
To maximize the Search Engine marketing outcome, three objectives should be clarified and adhered to. Choosing the right pages to link is the first one. Taking competitors and their method of dealing with marketing campaigns is the second step. The third and usually the most interesting one, is writing ads so smart and attention capturing that users can’t help but click.
However, the planning stages of an SEM campaign have been shortly discussed, using the simplified, but the most significant features of this marketing model. Of course, without knowledge into our new market, and into the online behavior of our target audience, and thus failing to present relevant adds of high quality, the business marketing venture will give no fruits and be doomed to failure.
Global Search Engine Optimization
As you might know, there are two aspects of Search Engine Optimization－the on-page and off-page. Both of them are equally challenging and may even be troublesome in terms of searching multilingual websites. Link building with foreign partners might be taken as an example of the complex work done. In addition, it requires an extensive knowledge of the influencers in your niche within the new market you are targeting, as well as offering high quality content in their own language to attract their interest.
Furthermore, if you have in mind an idea of translating keyword research that you conducted for your home market into the targeted market, you are suggested to better abandon it. can’t be merely translated. Not only will you have to translate your website into your target market’s language and do this to impeccability, but to do it all over again by re-optimizing your in-page content in a way that meets the search queries of users in this new market.
International Content Writing
The postulate upon which content marketing is built is the notion that mutual strong relationships between customers and product or service providers is what makes business develop and expand. Such relationships should be nourished in order to flourish. And, not only that, they should be enured by providing value which goes beyond the mere product. Articles, guides, e-books, tutorials, interviews, and similar formats are typical forms of content marketing practical implementation.
To approach and convince your foreign customers to give you their trust, you must provide them with quality content in their language. A goal like this can be achieved either by having your content transcreated by a localization company, or by hiring content writers in the given language, which is more likely.
Global Email Marketing
There is still high number of small businesses with an international customer base which do have a habit, let alone strategy of sending localized emails. What they do is to carry out one-fits-all international campaigns and lose immensely due to this mistake.
However, there are two main factors which should be focused on. The first one is localization, dealing with content adjusting to cultural habits and needs of the targeted customers. The second one is audience segmentation which should be done properly. It means an entrepreneur like you must be quick to learn at what times they are the most likely to open or click on your emails, and how to organize such emails to make them capturing and compelling.
Conclusions
Although venturing into global business has never been easy, of all the times in the human history, this is the moment when huge number of marketing methods, tools and techniques is blooming day by day. The introduction of the Internet has increased such possibilities and potentialities turning the volume slowly to the maximum with digital marketing coming to the stage. Global digital marketing is cheaper and easily applicable and conducted as other forms of marketing have never been before.
One of its greatest advantages is how easily enables insight into your audience, measure the campaigns’ results and enhance them consequently. If your customer, no matter who he is or where he comes from, becomes the focal point of your company, you may reap many beneficial outcomes of your attitude, expand your market with new clients on the basis of your loyal and satisfied old customers.
