Cindy King's International Business Blog » business blogs

Business Blogs To Get International Clients

Cindy King — Wed, 27 May 2009 23:00:56 +0000

How To Create An International Business Blog

Earlier this week we looked at how business blogging is a sales conversion tool and for international readers they are strongest at building relationships and making the connection across distance. The question is, can you expect to get international clients out of a business blog? Is an international business blog just as good at sales conversion as a business blog can be in it’s local environment?

Well it depends on several things:

Whether you already have international clients, or not
Where you are located and where your international clients are located
What you sell and what you can sell to your international clients

How International Blogs Bring You Sales

First here are the reasons why an international blog can bring you international clients. An international business blog can:

Provide a platform to give more lifetime value to any international customers you may already have
Make it easier to evaluate specific countries to explore further
Create authority & relationships for an initial step into a foreign country
Give your business visibility to bring in opportunities to create joint ventures or foreign partnerships

In order to get beyond the connection or communication platform you need something else.

The Secret Ingredient

An international business blog can only help you make sales if you find the way to develop relationships with your international blog readers. And this will depend on who you want to reach.

To make a business blog successful in international markets requires a bit more effort. You really need to dig and sift through your online options to find the right one or ones to use to create the authentic connection with your international audience. Then you need to examine your communication strategy carefully to see how this fits in with the culture you are trying to connect with.

It is no secret. Culture-customized content gets more sales. This also means foreign language content gets more sales.

Although your end goal is to create culture-customized communication plan, you can decide to start off with one broad international communication plan. This can give you the time you need to come up with a good strategy and find the right foreign content providers. You will need to transition through to fully customized content if you are serious about developing a foreign market.

One Possible Strategy

Here is an easy first step that works for many cases:

One international business blog, targeting a broad audience
Culture targeted social media marketing to promote your blog

This can create an online synergy and give you feedback on specific markets that can be of interest to you. This process can help you make the business decision to choose which foreign markets to develop first.

Your next action would be to conduct further country-specific campaigns outside of your blog. Your blog could then become a platform for your sales conversion process. However, the distance your blog can take you along the path of sales conversion would depend on a variety of factors relative to your business.

What about you?

How are you using your blog to engage with your international clients?
What challenges do you face when using your blog to reach international markets?
What successes have you had in connecting with international clients through your blog?

Please share your comments below.

Business Blogs To Open Foreign Markets

Cindy King — Tue, 26 May 2009 23:01:26 +0000

How To Create An International Business Blog

Yesterday I wrote about how a web presence is content marketing and described how different content can be used to fulfill different business objectives. Business blogs are great sales conversion tools because you create relationships, credibility and trust through blogging. At least this is how it works in your own markets.

Are blogs still sales conversion tools in international markets?

Today let’s look at how businesses can use blogs to open foreign markets. Before seeing how a business blog can fit in with your business objectives, let’s look at three key points to consider when blogging to build international markets:

Research For Feedback Before Investment

A business blog can be used to get feedback from a wide international audience. You can:

Use tools such as polls, to stimulate feedback
Carry out integrated marketing campaigns to targeted feedback

And of course you can do this targeting international audiences.

For businesses with a longer international strategy, a business blog can be a wise investment. It can shorten your time to enter a foreign market when you do decide to expand and it can help you avoid basic cultural blunders. You can use your time blogging to:

Become familiar with international markets of interest to you
Dialog with international clients to find out how you need to adjust your marketing strategy
Identify primary regions or countries for further international development
Uncover business opportunities you cannot see from your current location

A business blog can be a powerful international market research tool. In some cases, it can also be a stepping stone to reach your international markets before further business development.

Content Marketing Adapted To Foreign Markets

A business blog can only help you open foreign markets if you adapt your content marketing to communicate well within these foreign markets. This may sound complicated and it would be with a typical company website. With a blog it is much easier than you think.

Learn to listen to other cultures

You see, good blogging practices involve writing specifically for the people reading your blog. Blogging is about dialog. Bloggers use other social media platforms, together with some basic marketing tactics, to find out what their readers are interested in. It often simply involves asking readers what they want… and listening. You can easily do the same by filtering out your international readers.

Your international readers will probably have different concerns than your domestic clients. Blogging is a great way to find out what these are. Once you know what interests your readers, and find out how they like their information, it is easy to give it to them.

Language

When adapting your content for foreign markets there is the question of language. Foreign language, culturally-customized content will always get you more sales. But can you rush into selling someone your product if they do not know you? Probably not. You need to transition into foreign language content when you are ready.

I don’t know about you, but translation in blogging definitely does not appeal to me. Good blogs have personality. I think blogs are better when they are written directly by one person instead of two, which is what happens with translation. Otherwise readers will sense the translation and you risk losing the contact with them.

I always read books and watch movies in their original version. I think I would do the same with a blog.

The choice of language raises the important question of defining very clear readership targets with specific business goals. The determining factors in your decision will be whether your company language is English or not, where you are located and where you are targeting.

An English language company can usually create a blog in English for an international audience
A non-English language company might want to look into creating a blog in English to reach a wider audience

If you are an English language company and do not have one narrow cultural target audience, it is probably not worth the investment of getting a blog written in a foreign language. At least not until you find out more about your international markets and how your business objectives fit into that market.

Social Media Relationship Builders

These first two points may, or may not, be enough reason for you to consider creating a business blog to reach your international markets. There is one more element that you must not overlook… and must not underestimate.

Blogs are social media and different cultures respond different to social media

…and this can be great news for many businesses. To me, this is reason enough to get excited about blogging for international audiences. It acts as a turbo charge to the relationship-building aspect of having a business blog.

What does this mean?

Well, when you look at the different cultural scales you can see that some cultures have higher scores than others on the cultural scale of collectivism. This usually means that they like to talk to each other. They probably have other popular social media platforms in their country. You should be able to get a business blog to work well with people from these cultures.

The reason is because your blog is a social media platform. You have the possibility of connecting with other social media platforms and engaging in the dialog with your international markets. These countries probably have different social media platforms and you will need to find out where these are, how people use them and how you can connect to them. But the potential for authentic dialog with international clients while sitting in your home office is real.

International Relationship Building Tool

After all of this, do you think that a blog is an international sales conversion tool? Can a business blog can fit in with your business objectives? And where does it fit in?

Well, when you look at these three points it become clear that a blog targeting an international audience is more about discovering your international markets and building relationships.

This does have a strong advantage over traditional international business expansion methods. You can begin to learn about your foreign markets by creating a business blog:

From your current location
Without travel
Starting with little knowledge of your international markets

And you can create relationships with your prospects and clients abroad. An international business blog can take you a certain distance along the path towards international sales conversion. But alone it has its limits. Luckily in many cultures a well-thought out social media marketing strategy might bring you even further along that path towards sales conversion. More about that in the next article.

What about you?

How are you using your blog to engage with your international clients?
What challenges do you face when using your blog to reach international markets?
What successes have you had in connecting with international clients through your blog?

Please share your comments below.

Business Blogs For Sales Conversion

Cindy King — Mon, 25 May 2009 23:00:55 +0000

How To Create An International Business Blog

Are blogs a good idea for businesses? And what about blogging to reach international markets? Before you can answer these questions you have to understand the world your clients live in.

A Content Marketing World

Today we are all multichannel users.

How many times do you Google the products and services you see in a brochure before running into a store to buy them? When you are online and come across an interesting article on a subject of interest to you, what do you do? Of course, you will stop to read it. Now what happens if someone you trust recommends something? You will believe your friend, right?

It is fair to assume that your clients do the same thing. And probably some of your international clients.

Standing from inside a business, any presence online is about content marketing. No matter where you live and where your clients live it is still about content marketing.

Do you need to be online? Most business can benefit from an online presence, even the ones that do not think so. There are a few more criteria to look at when reaching out to international readers. But let’s leave that question for another day and continue the road to blogging for sales conversion.

Presence today is no longer a static website. You need more than an online presences, you need content marketing.

Content To Stimulate Different Response From Your Reader

Let’s look at these two ways to use content marketing:

Push your information onto people
Pull people to come to you

Both of these actions can be useful to a business. You use each one of these tactics for a different purpose.

First, let’s look at the pushing. An example of this is the content in a newsletter. When you push information onto your prospects and clients, your aim is usually to keep yourself on top of their minds.

Pulling is different. This is when you create content to attract people to come to you. Ideally you create content regularly and write it so that your readers want to come back to you regularly. Your content is enticing so people want to come back for more. It is content with personality that people can relate to. It is the opposite of a long, boring technical manual. It is easy, fun and enjoyable to read. The best example here is a blog because:

Blogs are written by people
Blogs have personality
Blogs are updated regularly and can incite readers to come back regularly to see what’s new

Content For Different Business Purposes

It is only natural that if one type of content stimulates your readers differently, then you also use different content for different business purposes. The two main uses for content are:

Lead Generation
Sales Conversion

White papers are known to be great lead generation tools. Blogs are great communication platforms to get people interesting in buying.

Blogs = Sales Conversion Platforms

Of course, this sales conversion can only take place within a good business strategy. You cannot simply start blogging and expect to increase your sales. The blog is just a communication platform, your business success depends on how you use it.

Let’s look at the key reason why blogs are such a good sales conversion tool…

Relationships Make Sales

Due to the very nature of a blog, readers feel a connection to a blog much more easily than through a company website or an advertisement. This is because blogs are a social media. Blogs create dialog. When you think about it, blogs are all about relationships.

Another advantage to blogs is they can help you increase traffic. You usually update a blog more than a website adding to search engine fodder. And readers come back to look for more interesting content which further increases your online visibility. More visibility increases the number of relationships you create.

But the best benefit for businesses with a blog is that a blog can help you establish authority, credibility and trust. And this is how you can use blogs to make sales.

Your blog communication helps you to convert prospects into loyal customers. The relationship building element of blogging makes blogs a good platform to do some of key business objectives:

Sales conversion
Cultivate loyalty

Blogging Within An International Business Strategy

Do you want to know how can blogging help you open new foreign markets? Stay tuned tomorrow.

Remember, blogging is a form of social media. All good blogs have a solid social media marketing strategy. The Social Media Success Summit 2009 is starting in a few hours. If you are also attending, please hook up with me on Twitter. Let’s enjoy the full social media experience of the summit.

What about you?

How are you using your blog to engage with your international clients?
What challenges do you face when using your blog to reach international markets?
What successes have you had in connecting with international clients through your blog?

Please share your comments below.

How To Know Where Your International Markets Really Are With Business Blogging

Cindy King — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 06:00:12 +0000

International Market Research

I‘ve already written on how blogs can be used for international business development and given the example of Abercrombie & Fitch’s successful French blog without any retail outlets in France .

Well, I started my French company on February 1st, and my two business blogs have been active for two months now:

this blog and my article directory over at Get International Clients.

I still haven’t put up the website for my French company, and now I’m glad this was delayed. I’m going to tell you why. But first…

Business Blogging

So how is my own business blogging going?

I’ve just finished tracking visitors for a full month on both blogs. Over 6000 visitors on each blog. I’m happy.

But I’m even happier with something else.

I’m a marketer at heart, and there is one huge advantage to business blogging no one seems to talk about, at least I hadn’t heard this before.

This first month’s tracking highlighted:

Business blogging = an absolutely fantastic international market research tool

These are my first blogs. They are new. The first comments are only just really coming in and I only have one months statistics to analyze. But even so, I’ve already identified 2 additional international markets for my areas of expertise.

Luckily I held off investing in certain expenses for my new company. I’m in the process of adjusting my international integrated marketing strategy!

Sure, I did all of my international market research before starting the blogs – the markets I had identified are still valid.

These are two totally new international markets I hadn’t identified with traditional international market research methods.

And they are both very interesting.

International Market Research Tool

What does this mean to companies expanding internationally?

The wealth of information you get from a business blog will dramatically decrease the risk and costs of the next steps in your international expansion.

If you are a company interested in developing your international markets you should seriously consider starting a business blog.

Create a blog specifically for your international readers
Use it as part of your preliminary international market research.

The feedback you get

either directly from your international readers
or from analyzing the statistics

will probably give you reason to readjust any international marketing strategies you are thinking of, no matter how much research you have done.

Business blogs give you a research tool in your foreign target countries. And regular business blogging gives you the tool to adjust your dialog constantly. Which leads to…

Blog Commitment

The other thing I’ve learned is the biggest challenge to business blogging is the exact same as in personal blogging:

Commitment.

Sometimes people underestimate the dedication needed for blogging, or simply lack the stamina to keep at it. You do need to be organized to reap the benefits of good business blogging.

No matter how organized you already think you are, you will probably need to develop your personal productivity skills even further.

Blog Productivity and Marketing Expertise Combined

Simpeology is a great productivity system run by top marketer Mark Joyner.

I’m evaluating a multi-media course on blogging from the folks at Simpleology. For a while, they’re letting you snag it for free if you post about it on your blog.

It covers:

The best blogging techniques.
How to get traffic to your blog.
How to turn your blog into money.

I’ll let you know what I think once I’ve had a chance to check it out. Meanwhile, go grab yours while it’s still free.

In the meantime, get over any business objections you might have about blogging. How valid are they? They are probably based on information and opinions from outside of your real international market in any case.

If you really want to get international clients, the international market research value you will get from business blogging will make up for any objection you can possibly imagine.

Ready, fire, aim & repeat…in real time with business blogging.

Join me with Mark Joyner’s Simpleology team.

I’m evaluating a multi-media course on blogging from the folks at Simpleology. For a while, they’re letting you snag it for free if you post about it on your blog.

It covers:

The best blogging techniques.
How to get traffic to your blog.
How to turn your blog into money.

I’ll let you know what I think once I’ve had a chance to check it out. Meanwhile, go grab yours while it’s still free.

More In These Get International Clients Business Guides:

Copyright Cindy King 2006-2010 - International Business Blog

How To Know Where Your International Markets Really Are With Business Blogging

Cindy King's International Business Blog » business blogs

Business Blogs To Get International Clients

How International Blogs Bring You Sales

The Secret Ingredient

One Possible Strategy

More on How To Create An International Business Blog:

More on International Social Media

More in these Get International Clients Business Guides

Business Blogs To Open Foreign Markets

Research For Feedback Before Investment

Content Marketing Adapted To Foreign Markets

Social Media Relationship Builders

International Relationship Building Tool

More on How To Create An International Business Blog:

More on International Social Media

More in these Get International Clients Business Guides

Business Blogs For Sales Conversion

A Content Marketing World

Content To Stimulate Different Response From Your Reader

Content For Different Business Purposes

Relationships Make Sales

Blogging Within An International Business Strategy

More on How To Create An International Business Blog:

More on International Social Media

More in these Get International Clients Business Guides

How To Know Where Your International Markets Really Are With Business Blogging

Business Blogging

International Market Research Tool

Blog Commitment

Blog Productivity and Marketing Expertise Combined

More On International Market Research:

More In These Get International Clients Business Guides: