Managing international online marketing

An interview with Katy Andić, European Web Marketing Manager at Misco

Our articles by Emma Durant on the challenges of managing international marketing online have been popular, so when I recently connected with Katy Andić of Misco on LinkedIn, I thought it would make an interesting case study of how these challenges are managed in practice.  Misco provides a range of over 25,000 IT products via online and direct mail channels across Europe. A big thank you to Katy for summarising the approach Misco use to manage international online marketing in an interview with me.

Resources for managing local markets

Q. How many different European sites do you co-ordinate at Misco? What resource do you have available in each country for managing the site content? What are the biggest challenges in managing across all these sites?

There are marketing resources in each country UK, DE, NL, FR, ES, IT and SE. In addition, there is an online presence in IE, BE, AT and CH.

Some of the biggest challenges are sharing which forms of marketing are effective in terms of sales but also the most cost effective for ROI.

Other factors such as localisation of content must be considered as one size cannot fit all this comes from understanding the different user behaviours of European customers and how they interact on the web.

Best approaches for managing localisation?

Q. What advice would you give to someone taking on your sort of role for the first time? What is best way to approach manage the challenges You can never stand still when you work in Ecommerce marketing; it is always changing with new technologies, web portals, routes to market and how customers expect to engage with a brand - it’s a continual learning process.

I would recommend that any marketer should understand their marketing programs /channels at a granular level for costs & ROI. Plus, look at the type of customer they attract, whether it is a new or repeat customer.

For personal development, the best way is keep as up-to-date with the web industry as much as possible with key web marketing forums and your web peers. Most importantly, listen to your customers - understand how they use your website from your analytics, you may think as a marketer customers will act or respond in a certain way to an ad or a landing page. However, once you’ve put it live, that’s not the job done. Watch and learn from your customer’s navigation - it can tell you so much, allowing you to change the outcome of your web campaign before it’s too late.

Localisation approaches

Q. In your experience, which aspects of a site do you think it’s particularly important to localise?

Do you have any examples of where the needs of customers for different parts of the marketing mix differ in different countries? 

Language is key to localisation on websites, all countries require all content in their native tongue, but some will also require a second choice such as English. Some countries have additional taxes or surcharges that not only need to be listed at basket level but also at every product level, so customers are fully aware of these at the very start of their web journey. Other items such as address fields need to be customised; some countries do not have the equivalent of post codes. Even design can differ, some markets may require a more conservative design or colour schemes and other markets require bolder ads.

Localisation of social media marketing

Q. How important is social media marketing for Misco and to what extent do you localise social media for each country? Each market control their own social networking campaigns and have brand presence on the top 3 (Facebook, Twitter and Linkedin) and recognise the importance of this channel as a fast growing communication tool.

Benchmarking using web analytics

Q. How do you approach using web analytics to compare and review the marketing effectiveness of each country site. I think it’s important to make time to use web analytics to do in-depth analysis for every marketing campaign.

We encourage the marketers in different countries to understand and share with the rest of the business the traffic influences (good, bad, and the ugly) and key sales converters which helps future decisions and actions to be proactive rather than reactive.