While region-specific advertising is an effective method for penetrating international markets, creating a global search engine optimization (SEO) is the best long-term approach. If your business is already established overseas, investing in SEO is highly recommended.
International marketing will likely require having different language versions of your site, making it as SEO-friendly as possible, and ensuring a smooth user experience using hreflang tags in the code. It is recommended to practice using canonical links to inform Google that different versions of the resource do not contain duplicate content. Hreflang tags provide the appropriate version of the site to users depending on their location, reducing the bounce rate.
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Social media accounts for specific locations
Similar to creating multiple skype data package language versions of your website, it’s worth considering extending this to social media accounts as well. Users are looking for content in their native language, which allows marketers to reach them across multiple channels.
But for small scale operations, maintaining international social accounts may be unnecessary. If you receive a lot of requests/messages in a foreign language, it may be wise to create a corresponding social network account for that language or region.
Product Adaptation Strategy in International Marketing
When expanding internationally, it is necessary to adapt the product to local conditions. In this regard, five strategies for adapting a product to the specifics of foreign markets are used in the field of international marketing:
Standardization of distribution – maximum unification of products, promotion methods and distribution network. This allows to reduce costs (for example, research and development, modification of production, advertising), but can reduce potential profits.
Product adaptation – the product is adapted to some extent to the foreign market, while the promotion methods remain unchanged. It can be extended to several countries, which leads to the emergence of a regional model.
Adaptation of communications – the product remains unchanged, but a specific set of marketing interactions is used on the foreign market. The developed concepts are implemented taking into account the conditions of the foreign market.
Double adaptation – the product is significantly adapted to the local market, and promotional tools are used taking into account local peculiarities.
Innovative product – a completely new product enters the foreign market, and marketing methods are adapted to local conditions. This method is usually the most expensive, but also the most effective in terms of profit.