Using content to drive international sales

New report highlights opportunities for companies to attract global trade online

Against a backdrop of a challenging economic times in domestic markets, many companies are looking at opportunities for international expansion.

In our recent white paper, Web Magnetism: Attracting Global Trade Online we review the opportunities and look at how companies are responding. This post gives a summary of our main findings.

1.  Use of the Internet to drive overseas sales

Our research showed that, surprisingly, 64% of senior decision makers do not recognise the Internet in their top three avenues for driving overseas trade. The survey, conducted in Q2 2012, analysed attitudes amongst 350 senior decision makers in ‘large enterprises’, defined as companies with 200 employees or more, spread across the UK.

The white paper demonstrates that UK businesses seem to be missing out on a golden opportunity. With opportunities thin on the ground in local markets, companies should be looking to the internet to drive overseas sales and maintain, even increase revenue.

Some UK companies have already done this in a particularly notable way. British online fashion and beauty retailer, ASOS, for example, routinely reports revenue growth from overseas custom based on its digital marketing activities. It recently announced Q2/12 YOY sales growth in US, European Union and ‘rest of world’ countries of 83%, 27% and 61% respectively.

2. Define your multilingual internet marketing strategy

The paper also provides strategic and tactical insights for domestic B2B and e-commerce/online retail organisations looking to use localised content to increase international site visitors. It strongly advocates the use of mother-tongue linguists in the formulation of a multilingual internet marketing strategy and explores the relationships between foreign language use, online customer experience, commercial website development and search engine indexing.

We found that for 73% of companies, the use of native language speakers was seen as ‘very important’ to the buying process by overseas customers, suggesting the need for accurate identification of foreign language search terms for search engine results.

93% of research respondents have relied heavily on international trade to maintain or grow revenues since the economy crashed in 2008; it is therefore more important than ever for businesses to focus on business growth from overseas.

When a retailer’s website is their primary vehicle for trading abroad it is vital not only for the site to be visible in the global and regional search engines, but for it to be tuned into the buying habits and behavioural nuances of local market customers.

3. Importance of knowledge and digital skills

The global ecommerce sector is evolving fast. The biggest inhibitor is the absence of the knowledge and skills needed to harness the commercial power of the internet to support trade in foreign language markets. It’s no-one’s fault that these traits aren’t typically found in a business that has grown up operating in the UK alone, but it is a problem. That said, for those that do skill up (and there are plenty that have), the truth is that it has never been easier for a business to start trading abroad.

It is therefore astounding that, with all that is happening economically, so many businesses are not reaping the rewards of the online channel. Now is the time for UK businesses to embrace the web as an avenue for recouping revenue losses from their local market and seek to grow their business once more through foreign trade.

Search engine optimisation (SEO) and pay per click (PPC) advertising are powerful tools when administered by the right people and can bring significant gains to businesses savvy enough to recognise the opportunity that is staring right at them.

You can download the full paper from the Search Laboratory website.

Thanks to Jimmy McCann for sharing his advice and opinions in this post. Jimmy is Head of SEO at Search Laboratory in Leeds. You can follow him on Twitter or connect on LinkedIn.