Seven Elements of International Marketing

 

Seven Elements of International Marketing

The elements to consider include:

• Research
• Infrastructure
• Product localization
• Marketing localization
• Communications
• Inbound marketing
• Outbound marketing

Research doesn’t require much explanation – but there’s a long list of points to check. Are “cookies” allowed? Can you make direct competitor comparisons? Are there labeling or disclaimer requirements? How will the personas of your target demographic differ in a new market? What bandwidth cost and availability constraints limit access by your target market? Is email penetration adequate, or will SMS be more effective? How “viral” is the culture and your target group? What search engines are most effective (use InternationalMan.com contributor Bill Drake’s recommended tool for this task), and on which local language keywords must you optimize? Which social media tools do your target personas rely upon? (Just because you are keen on maintaining anonymity like many International Man readers, and find “tweeting” inane, doesn’t mean your customers do too!)

Infrastructure is the dry set of administrative details that you’ll seriously regret not attending to. Securing the top level domains (TLDs) – before enterprising squatters – for your company and brands (e.g., internationalman.ar, br, .cl, .co, .gt, .hn , .mx, .pa, .pe, .py, .sv, .uy & .ve to complement .com as you enter LatAm markets) allows you to create local language microsites later, which are optimized for prevalent search engines in focus markets as well as the local Google engine. Ensure that trademarks are registered (in your company name – not a local agent) to avoid the nightmare of having your genuine product seized in customs as counterfeit!

Product must be localized in packaging (label language, no ‘gimongous’ club-store packs are sold in typical emerging markets, refrigeration/distribution infrastructure are often primitive), formulation (scents, voltage, colors), labeling (regulatory differences are substantial), and even suggested use/application.

Marketing localization is where the black magic of international marketing is applied, and it is here where you will leverage or squander your opportunity to accommodate local cultural expectations, and still capitalize on the cachet which “Made in America” still carries in many markets. Colloquially appropriate translation (not direct, but rather adapted message) combined with appropriate imagery, color selection, fonts and even output size (e.g., US letter vs. A4) are all localization considerations. Referring back to your brand names, to avoid the ‘nova’ and ‘mist’ mistakes, they should be vetted not only for explicit concerns, but even for ‘sounds like’ conflicts in local languages.

Communications requires that the message and marketing communications be appropriately tailored for the local market – almost as an element of localization.

International inbound marketing is essentially SEO on steroids. The methodology is predicated on several factors:

1.  Buyers are increasingly savvy. They are inundated with marketing messages and practice ‘selective consumption’, rarely acknowledging marketing invitations. When they want info, though, they use the internet, not to visit an on-line brochure (most websites), but rather to search for a solution.

2.  Google is increasingly savvy. The ranking of sites offering solutions is based on relevance and authority. Those are determined by a number of factors, but increasingly, “content” is the key. Content is fresh (regular additions) high quality material (blog posts, eBooks, whitepapers, videos, etc.) which is valuable to consumers and speaks directly to “long-tail” keywords, e.g. international personal asset diversification” vs. “diversification.

3.  Traffic used to be cool – today, though, it has little intrinsic value as a metric. Certainly you must constantly increase traffic. SEO, social media, and blogging contribute to this. But traffic must convert to prospects before it has any functional value. Prospects aren’t ready to be assaulted by a sales rep – but have some interest. That interest (and the relationship with your company) must be nurtured. This can and should be done automatically with … you guessed it … more content which moves them along a sales funnel.

So, the goal of your website (at least the marketing front end) is to convert traffic to prospects, and capture some basic info to begin to build a relationship. And the goal of your inbound marketing program is to have a metrics-rich tool which lets you relentlessly tweak the process.

Inbound marketing has a number of virtues – not least of which are its extremely low relative cost and its unique fit to the way the world now researches products and services.

In its international form, inbound marketing involves localizing the approach (keywords, content, inbound links, and other refinements) so that buyers in potential markets, searching in their own language, on their own local search engines, will find you … and find you accessible.

Outbound marketing is the set of tools (email, SMS, infomercial, etc.) that you will use to broadcast your message as you begin to build a following in a target market.

There are a lot of steps, and layers of nuance. It’s not intuitive, and most challenging is the requirement to iterate in one market (or at least region) after another.