*Clarity In Marketing

With predictions of an economic downturn rife you should be looking for new markets where your products or services have an advantage in terms of quality, price or demand. One option is the international market where factors such as different economic cycles, exchange rates or lack of competitors could count in your favour.

Selling to other countries is not without challenges of course. You’ll need to get to know the market in your target countries and check for any legislation issues relating to your product or service and how you market it. A good starting point if you are considering doing business in another country is the Business Link website which offers useful guidance.

10 Steps to provide local content in global search

Once you have identified countries you’d like to target and developed specific, relevant offers based on your market research, you’ll want to get your products and services showing in local search results. A recent post by Joe Bursell of Vertical Response provides these 10 very handy tips.

1. Use one main domain e.g. www.example-site.com only - with this method the creation of country-specific sub-domains is unnecessary.
2. Create an explicitly named country-specific page for each geographic target market e.g. www.example-site.com/albania.
3. Submit each one of those country-specific pages to Google Webmaster Tools and specify its target location to direct the Google Crawlers from the right geographic location to the correct content.
4. Place country-specific location content in each page using main cities or regions e.g. "we provide stuff to Albania, in Tiranë, Durrës, Elbasan" etc. as a geographically relevant signal to the engines.
5. Submit each country specific page to Google Local (where that option exists)- this further reinforces geographic relevance in search.
6. Build links for each country-specific page with sites that have the relevant Country Code Top Level Domain e.g. www.example-site.al for Albania.
7. Submit country-specific articles to article sites and directories (there are 1,000s). These articles should reference the target country, and provide links back to the relevant country-specific page.
8. Use unique content for each country-specific page. It has to be unique or you're telling the engines that's it's spammy and of little/no value.
9. If you have a business address in a targeted country, use that address for further Google Local and geo-location purposes, with the use of vCard footers and other geo-location flags.
10. Select geographically relevant keywords to optimise each country-specific page with.

There may well be more, but these are a great baseline to start from. The key take-away here, as with any marketing, is to make your messaging and content "relevant". With good copywriting and sensitivity to your target market you could also make it "timely" and "personal"- thus fulfilling the marketers communication wish-list.

Selling to UK and European Markets

If you are considering selling to Europen markets or looking to sell your products or services to the UK from abroad, contact Clarity In Marketing to find out how we can provide you with the local knowledge and marketing support you'll need.