Try to remember the last time you purchased an item or service. Did you wait for a particular commercial to pop up on TV? Did you call a salesperson to ask about their service? No. You probably did what most people do nowadays – went online and searched for yourself. You may not be aware but you’re already caught up in a modern marketing strategy called inbound marketing.
Penetrating new markets on a global scale is not easy, but novelty technics like inbound marketing can make this process much easier.
What is inbound marketing?
Inbound marketing is a strategy focused on attracting, educating, and empowering consumers via relevant content that helps and guides them until they are ready to purchase your product or service. That road to purchase is the buyer’s journey, an active exploration or research process that a buyer goes through, before and leading up to the actual purchase. When you use inbound marketing strategies, customers will find you, instead of you having to find them. Without pouring money into advertising you create something of value and interest for your target audience, which generates free conversions to your recourse. Now that is revolutionary!
Inbound marketing is great because it allows you to attract consumers, generate leads using SEO, content marketing, social media, and other channels that are perceived by users as organic, therefore do not cause rejection, unlike conventional ads which can be perceived as intrusive.
Being the most progressive marketing strategy up to date, inbound marketing generates trice the number of leads for each dollar than conventional marketing strategies (according to statistics).
It’s a great way to start your businesses’ global expansion!
5 ways to employ inbound marketing while going global:
- Create diverse content
You might think you can skip this step because you already have great content, but you really shouldn’t. Content that is specially designed for the target market and its audience is your best shot at building a successful global strategy with inbound marketing. Learn about your target countries, their traditions, the way business is done, how they market their products, and make special localized content to match local consumer demand.
- Localize.
The main idea of inbound marketing is that good quality content attracts potential buyers for you. But how can you go global when all your content is in your local language? The answer is – you can’t. Although inbound marketing is a killer strategy you still need to do your fair share of preparation for it to work for you globally, and part of it is content localization.
Content localization means adapting both your written and graphic content for your chosen target market – not only translating it but revising photos and banners you use, color choices, tweaking it to be relevant for your target audience. While doing so one must take into account local culture, traditions, trends, consumer behavior, etc.
Sounds tricky? It is! That’s the way most companies usually get some help from freelancers or translation agencies. You can review the best translation companies online compared to determine reliable ones for your content translation. A localized version of your content should be suitable and desirable for your target audience, so it is best to leave localization to professionals.
- Platform optimization is a must.
Now that your website and other marketing platforms are translated and appealing to the target audience, take an extra step, and make sure that they are optimized for use by foreign customers. This will include: making sure your payment options are operational in your target country, delivery to the target market is possible, prices are displayed in a local currency, etc.
- Global visibility with SEO.
Localized platforms allow great opportunity to use keywords in different foreign languages – you can double and triple your keyword options when using multilingual platforms and ensure that your website, blog, etc. are showing up in the target country’s search results, especially in Google. After all, reports show that over 90% of global traffic derives from Google search.
- Use your content distribution channels incoherence.
Let’s say you have a website, a blog, Instagram, Facebook, and Pinterest accounts that represent your company. That is great! But can your clients and followers easily find all these media platforms? If your Instagram follower has no idea about your Pinterest page this means that you are doing something wrong. Do your best to optimize all your content distribution platforms and operate them together for top results.
Going global means expanding, adjusting, and adapting. Using an inbound marketing strategy to propel yourself into the global market is a smart decision that will not take long to pay off. Inbound marketing can truly boost your global market presence and reel in potential customers from all over the world, as one can not over enthuse power of the right content and the effect it can have on a company’s success.
[About the author: Dedicating part of his life to research, Mark Blackwood now reaps the fruit of his labor as a freelance content creator. He believes in hard work, cooperation, and creativity. His biggest is having his content appreciated and finding new friends online.]