Training. It’s generally something that everybody wants to have but organisations are loathed to pay for. In many cases, it comes down to the individual’s ability to persuade the powers that be that the course is worth the time and money to attend and will ultimately benefit the business as a whole.
When it comes to international marketing, this is an unknown area for many, with a lot of challenges and new ideas to understand and apply. As the International Marketing School launches a new range of courses specifically for international marketers, I wanted to share some of the reasons international search marketing training can dramatically improve global results and performance. And they might just help you convince Management to let you attend one.
Consolidating the Basics
Running search campaigns in international markets brings a whole new set of challenges. No matter how much experience you have in search in your own language and country, you’ll need to get your head round new concepts, complexities and opportunities to make a real success of your multinational campaigns. Reinforcing the key points, clarifying any confusions and taking in the bigger picture, will enable you to develop and run effective, efficient campaigns without making common, costly mistakes.
Understanding Language
There is no substitute for native speakers in international search. Whether it be developing a link network, doing keyword research or crafting ad copy, the best results will only come from someone who intuitively understands the language, the culture and the country. You might have an in-house team or use outsourced resources, but unless you’re a genius with the ability to stop time, you won’t be carrying out all this work yourself – and nor should you be.
However, that doesn’t mean you can wash your hands of any responsibility for the quality of this work or the results and understanding how languages work, how they can impact decisions and where they differ can help you ensure you get the best from your team and their output. Basic insights into how languages are grouped together and how they are structured and constructed can enable you to identify trends or anomalies, analyse and understand results and ask the right questions of those who are delivering the work.
Getting to Grips with the Search Engines
Chances are you are fairly confident with using Google, but what about Naver, Yandex, Baidu, Qihoo – and even Bing. These are all major global search engines, which will play a role if you are targeting huge online markets like China, Russia and South Korea. While there are some similarities between them all – there are some pretty big differences too. This can range from how much importance they give to social signals or links to how many PPC match types they offer. If you want to give your website the best possible visibility, maximise your paid search budget and attract potential customers to your site, a grounding in these major search engines will be a big step to achieving that.
Understanding the Opportunities and Threats
The online world is full of opportunity but of course it’s not without threats or challenges. When deciding which new markets to enter, or how to develop your presence in existing ones, there are many factors to consider – from logistics to demand to internet usage and behaviour. Taking a deeper look at the overall global picture, as well as individual markets in-depth will paint a picture of what to expect, how you will need to adapt strategies and campaigns and how you can ensure you stay one or several steps ahead of the competition. This could stop you making mistakes, wasting valuable time and money and even damaging your reputation.
Bringing Efficiencies to International Campaigns
A common challenge for international marketers is scaling activity across multiple languages and markets, to make it both manageable and cost-effective. Unfortunately no training will be able to provide the magic dust which will eliminate this issue, but you will gain tactics and techniques for maximising efficiencies, from global website templates to common keywords to content. This will save you time, money and maybe most importantly headaches. And it will probably make you pretty popular with your boss.
While you’re not going to learn all you need to know about the complex world of international search in a couple of days, the points above are just a few examples of how programmes focused on this specific field can drive better understanding, awareness and therefore performance on the global stage and open up a world of opportunity you didn’t know existed.
Gemma Houghton
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Great article, and very useful.
Thanks.