Choose How You Connect With Your Foreign Markets

By Cindy King  ·  20 Comments
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As an international marketer, I often encounter businesses that are not using their website effectively within an international marketing strategy.

Good web marketing practices will get your website to work well. But if you are really serious about developing your international business you need more than a website. You need to touch your international prospects and clients at different levels.

You need multichannel marketing for several important reasons:

  • This is how you will get to understand these new markets without having foreign staff.
  • This is how you will get more foreign market feedback and interaction.
  • A website alone just does not break through certain cross cultural barriers.


So how do you go about finding the right channels you should use to reach one particular country?

There is no easy way to get the answer. The right marketing channels for your business depend on many different factors.

The good news, is that finding the right channels is something you can do yourself… but only once you jump in an start interacting with your foreign markets.

Do some quick research to make the best educated guess you can. Then start communicating with your foreign market, and plan to re-focus, re-target and adapt your communication as you interact with your new markets.

Need some ideas on where to get some international market research? Here is one.

I read an interesting post on the Duct Tape Marketing Blog yesterday and came across a report I have not seen before.

If you are deciding which marketing channels to use online, this report is worth a read.

Universal Mccann International Social Media Research Wave 3

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: socialmedia research)

There are a two things I noticed in this report.

  • Different countries have different speeds of adopting new media.
  • Last years trends have changed dramatically in some countries.

Is this report the best out there? No, but it is a good start. Do a some more research… and get on the phone and confirm your findings with appropriate people in your target countries.

What do you think? Please leave your thoughts and comments below.

Photos from Shutterstock.

  Filed under: international market research

                                                


Cindy King