Cindy King's International Business Blog » business directory

How Too Many Contributions Spoil International Communications

Cindy King — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 23:00:16 +0000

Yesterday I told you how I now have 20 odd domains live waiting for me to get to writing landing page text for them.

As I said, I simply put up an article or two from my business directory so that Google would have a few weeks head start in finding them before I would start promoting them.

I have not advertised any of these domain names in any way. So I was surprised last week when I saw a very thoughtful comment on one of these websites.

In fact, I think the domain name must be good because it gets a steady trickle of traffic.

The comment was from a business professional who said that if his company were to adopt a culture customized content strategy he thought every single department head would want to contribute.

First Thought

My first reaction was to chuckle. It was obviously from an American about an American company. I just finished reviewing the tags on about 50 of my cultural web tool articles on Get International Clients.

These articles are based on how you can use Geert Hofstede’s cultural behaviors on your website when customizing it for different cultural markets.

Americans have a high score in the individualism scale. Of course every department will want to have their say in implementing a new website communication strategy for their business.

The problem is that if one person was in charge and based in their home country’s office, he would have his work cut out to get the culture customized content right for a foreign market.

Add different agendas from different departments all located in the same home country office and you have stalemate. You are sure never to get your culture customized content perfect.

Second Thought

All things being equal, what a wonderful opportunity for companies in cultures with high collectivism score.

Hmm… I have to follow Asian web marketing when it matures further. And after a little more thought, I also think the Arab and South American worlds will also be very interesting to watch too.

Of course, the key here is “all things being equal” and there are several elements that make comparison difficult. One of them being different rates of market maturity. This would require longer analysis.

Final Thoughts

As a marketing executive for American companies, responsible for Europe, Africa and the Middle East, I was often confronted with the typical American hands on approach to culture customized marketing.

Translation: all marketing materials usually came from North America, or had to be approved by North America. All other communication was often “controlled” or “shared” – depends how you want to look at it. Priority was often given to North Americans for key field positions.

Also, from my own experience, native field executives had a harder time to get their culture customized suggestions acted upon.

There is something else that strikes me. As an American marketing and selling in foreign countries the language is different than when marketing and selling in North America.

When you are in the field, marketing and selling to foreign customers, you cannot use the same marketing and sales language.

You naturally limit your own vocabulary so the others can understand you.
You also limit the use of different concepts.

With these constraints everything gets back to basics. Your natural option is to find out precisely what your foreign clients needs and wants and how you can sell that to him.

This is a place where the people in company headquarters simply cannot come unless they are out there meeting these same people.

Now some companies set up weekly phone calls and yearly international road trips for their senior North American management. This can bring insights and lead to trust in letting the right person do the job at hand. The trouble is this is often a top marketing or sales executive with other agendas to deal with too. I have rarely seen large North American companies use culture customized content effectively.

Besides, I wonder if these same companies are more interested in branding their own company image only in a way they can identify with and feel the that culture customized content is counter productive to this.

In the end, I think there are real market opportunities for companies that actively strive towards customizing their communication with the cultures of their foreign target markets.

Internet has taken away the advantage of bigger businesses targeting foreign markets if these same bigger businesses cannot learn from past mistakes.

Marketing sophistication is different in different countries. And beware if your current sophisticated marketing structure has gone so far it has left out the basics.

Remember…

Business is business everywhere.

Business is selling.

Selling at its basic level is an agreement between 2 parties.

Marketing helps make the sale easier.

When marketing or sales communication becomes everyone’s business in one culture, this communication does not make sales easy in another culture.

Cross-cultural selling is about getting back to the basics of business, where both cultures can connect and come to an agreement.

The business basics common to both cultures.

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Copyright Cindy King 2006-2010 - International Business Blog

How Too Many Contributions Spoil International Communications

My Own Case Study – Small Business Flexibility

Cindy King — Sun, 07 Sep 2008 23:00:12 +0000

International Web Marketing

As a very small business owner, I do have more flexibility in certain business strategies than many bigger businesses.

Content Creates An Online Communication Base

It has now been 7 months since I started my business directory.

Writing and publishing an article each work day for 6 months
Creating a business system
Recently color-coding on the website to make this system obvious to the readers

Of course, with over 200 articles there is now an obvious editorial direction for the website.

But I have always wanted an online communication base for my own business. Sure, I spent some time looking into the great Internet Marketing “Get Rich Quick” processes out there. It is a good way to pick up a lot of knowledge on web marketing practices.

This is what lead me into copywriting 3 years ago. But I chose to study copywriting because I already had good sales skills, and sales writing skills. Of course, you need good copywriting to make money on the web, whether you are in a typical get rich quick internet business or a brick and mortar business using the web as a tool. But recognizing good copywriting is already more than half the work done.

My situation was a little different. I already have valuable skills. I knew I wanted to use the internet primarily as a communication base for my own business services. My websites are there to communicate my international business development system.

All well and good. But how do you go about communicating your business system online to reach the right people, and to bring in the right clients?

Structure For Your Business

I found I needed matter to work with. Content. Lots of content. This took me 6 months of writing one article a day.

As a small business owner I had the flexibility to jump in and develop the structure on an on-going basis.

My primary focus was to write on and around my main business subject area. My articles are not primarily determined by niche keywords and research. Of course I tried to use appropriate keywords, and ran keyword searches from time to time. These searches often proved to me that I knew my subject matter well. My main focus was writing on my own clearly defined subject.

On a side note, my experience has shown this content strategy to give fantastic SEO results. I have come up on the first page of many different search results from month 3 onwards. Businesses from all over the world find me.

People pay money for SEO? Why don’t they sharpen their business perspective and knuckle down to work on exploiting what is basically a communication platform?

Now that the content structure is there, the content is extremely easy to create. This business directory has become very easy for me to feed.

Using the flexibility I had in the beginning probably gave me a better structure 6 months later than if I had planned everything offline first.

So, I now have time for the next business phase and it is now in progress. This is the phase which links my business directory to my business.

What does that mean?

A Real Specific Business Offer And Not The Get Rich Quick Web Marketing

First of all I have a several new URL’s, or domain names, for very specific landing pages. Now these landing pages are not the get rich quick type. These are simply landing pages targeting each of the specific products and services I offer.

These products and services form a lead generation strategy. This means:

There are some landing pages for free products, some for paid products and services.
There are also some landing pages for the same product, but written for different audiences.

This leads to a fair number of new websites, even if they are mainly mini-websites.

Ready Fire Aim

My immediate task is to set up 20 odd landing pages. This takes time. I am doing just about everything single handed:

Lead generation strategy
Web marketing strategy
Copywriting
International SEO

Yes, it is a fair task, even just for mini-sites.

But as a small business owner I do have some flexibility. Also as a small business owner I value batch processing.

So one of the first things I have done is to put all of the URL’s live. I simply put all of the websites up with an article or two from my main business directory.

As a small business owner, I feel I can do this.

It is essentially a Ready Fire Aim approach.

Having all of the websites up early, means that Mr. Google will find them soon. I will appreciate this when I actually get the website ready and want to promote it. Tomorrow I start writing a new landing page website one after the other.

Online Flexibility Brings Success

One of the basics of international web marketing is testing and adjusting your communication. Your communication needs to be live before you get any real market feedback.

Market feedback often shows you how to improve your message. The better your online communication is, the more sales you can expect.

Market feedback will also show you where your business potential lies.

So there will be lots of adjustments to the landing pages. That is my second business phase.