International Web Marketing Specialties

by Cindy King on 10 March, 2010

I just read Tamar Weinberg’s internet marketing advice and noticed the different internet marketing specialties she listed:

Search Engine Optimization
Link Building
Affiliate Marketing
Pay Per Click Marketing
Social Media Marketing
Email Marketing
Content Marketing

I agree with Tamar when she says you can’t be an expert in every one of these. Most web marketers have one area they are really good at.

This got me thinking about the specialties I use to reach international audiences for my own business. The first thing I noticed is that I don’t use Link Building, Affiliate Marketing and Pay Per Click Marketing. And this is probably because I tend to jump right into new markets to learn everything I can about them first.

I don’t see myself getting into link building as it’s done by most people today. I tend to approach link building through social networking, more about that in a minute. But I do see link building changing in the future and I’ll probably be right there when it does because it will involve more meaningful networking.
And I don’t see myself ever getting big into pay per click marketing. But having said that, I’m closely following the results others get with Facebook advertising and may use something similar in small doses in the future.
Although I’m not really interested in the traditional affiliate marketing practices, I do a lot of networking and do use similar practices to build business networks. I can see myself joining in when this morphs into the business networking world a bit more.

After looking at the web marketing I do not specialize in, here is how I see my own international web marketing specialties.

International Social Networking

It all starts here for me. This is how I learn what to do next, the other tactics I need to use and whether my web marketing is on target or not. I rely on the feedback and constantly analyze results to learn more about my new international markets.

Social networking is a mindset and a way of being. It’s what you need for successful international web marketing.

Although Tamar doesn’t have social networking on her list, it is a part of good link building, affiliate marketing and social media marketing. And I think it is essential in international web marketing and needs to be in a category all by itself.

I would definitely say this is my strongest international web marketing specialty.

Social Media Marketing

Social media marketing goes hand in hand with international social networking because much of the social networking starts on social media.

Social media marketing is not always a big component of international web marketing. It really depends on where you’re based and which markets you want to reach. And you need to keep your finger on the social media pulse of the countries you’re interested in reaching, because things change rapidly.

I’m based in France and target an English speaking audience. So I use social media extensively to develop my international business network and everyone in a similar situation should do so too.

Social media marketing works very well for me. I’ve written before about how surprised I was when I realized my social media marketing was always 100% on target. And I’ve come to realize this is because of the similarities between my international business skills and the cross-cultural people skills.

My strong international business development skills make it easy for me to adapt business objectives into new environments.
And my strong cross-cultural skills come in very handy in this social environment. I know myself well enough to navigate between the social and the business focus, skills you pick up when doing business with people from different cultures.

I would say this is my second strongest web marketing specialty.

Content Marketing

I love the results you get from content marketing. There are organic search results of course. But you also get lots of feedback through content marketing, and this feedback is important when you are trying to develop new markets in different countries.

And once you get feedback there’s so much more you can do to try to develop the relationships you create. First there’s listening and paying attention to the whole conversation. And then even if the content is static once it’s published online, you can still bounce back with more content and use different formats to see what the reactions this brings about. It’s a game about finding out more about your audience.

I really find this fun and I’m good at it on subjects where I have enough knowledge to see the whole game.

Search Engine Optimization

Many businesses that want to develop international markets worry about the cultural differences in SEO and there are a few other search engines besides Google out there. But the reality is that the Google algorithm does makes the vast majority of the world’s search engines tick.

So it makes sense to get great at SEO in the Google world first. And then once you’ve mastered this you can work on improving SEO results in other countries. And the truth is that if you understand your international clients, if you know the words they use when they need help online, and you have a good understanding of SEO, then you’ll know how to get good search engine results throughout most of the world.

SEO is important for everyone online and I spend a fair bit of time improving my skills and learning enough to follow the well-known SEO geeks and understand what they are talking about.

Email Marketing

This is my weakest skill because I don’t do enough of it myself and also because I barely read a handful of email marketing messages sent my way on a regular basis.

Instead of building an email list for all of my blog readers when I first started, I jumped in at the deep end and focused on building segmented marketing lists:

Professionals interested in developing their cultural skills
Businesses needing how to advice on getting international clients
French people interested in copywriting
French people interested in article marketing

This is not something I necessarily recommend you do, after all the funnel does start off with a wide end and then goes narrow. But I like testing and playing around with marketing to learn more about my markets, that’s why I did things this way.

But I do follow a few people who use culturally targeted email marketing to develop international markets. I’m not sure how much this works in other cultures, but it’s definitely something I’ll probably spend some time looking into in the future.