Marketing to a global audience

Once your website is ready to receive customers from abroad, you need to make sure they are seeing your site and your products. But in a recent survey carried out by eCommerce solutions provider Digital River, 57% of respondents found marketing abroad to be a significant challenge.

Prospective customers might find your site differently depending on their country. There are a number of ways that you can get your products out there and make the most of your new potential customer base.

Global Search Engine Optimisation

SEO tactics are not a “one size fits all” technique, you will need to alter your strategy depending on the country you are targeting. Once you have established which new markets you want to go for, you should leverage Google Target Audience for that area and find out what the key search terms are in that place. Google breaks these down into several sections – countries, territories, regions and cities.

IP targeting

This is another layer of SEO magic you can weave in to make sure your site is relevant. This involves distributing ads based on the location of the searcher. The major search engines all use IP addresses to serve geo-targeted ads.

You might chose to conduct a paid search campaign (PPC). The way you might structure this could depend on which market you are targeting. Should the campaign be brand specific, feature specific o

r price specific? These will depend on cultural preferences in the way people shop.

Make sure you tailor to the correct search engine

Another important factor to keep in mind is which search engines are most popular in the various markets you are targeting. Google is the primary search engine used in the UK and the US but Baidu is most commonly used in China and Yahoo! In Japan. These different search engines will rank search results according to different factors – making sure you are aware of these differences should give you a search result boost.

Email and related items marketing

You should be fully aware of what the rules are around email marketing in the various markets you are heading for. For example in many countries there are rules about opt in or out for subsequent marketing emails. In the States it is perfectly fine to offer opt-out but in Europe, it must be an opt-in.

There will also be different rules about how you can promote related items after the sale.

“How aggressive you can be with selling related merchandise depends on country,” says James Gagliardi, VP of product and innovation at Digital River.

“In the US you can be quite invasive in drawing attention to extra products but in places such as France you need to employ a soft-sell. You should conduct as much A/B testing as possible to find significant differences or even slight nuances.”

Get an appropriate domain

Another way to make sure your site gets a prominent search listing in another country is to tailor the domain. Each country has its own domain code. Search engines such as Google recommend using a country’s domain extension.

This isn’t always possible due to restrictions, for example to use an Australian domain, you need an Australian business number. If you come across this issue you can look into creating a subdomain for use in that country.

Finding a partner in the new market

Linking up with an eCommerce business or brand that is already established in the new market can give you that extra visibility that you need to become established. You need to do some research and find out who your products and brand would be a good fit with and star to approach them with a partnering plan.

It may just be a short term partnership until your brand takes off, it might be a great long term solution, either way it is worth exploring. These potential partners understand the new market far better than you will initially.