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Expand your territory
with Online Marketing. |
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You are faced with expanding your customer base. The regional competition
is tough but there seem to be various potential market niches in other
countries that haven't been tapped yet.
How do you go about testing this theory? The existing data is sketchy.
You could hire a market research company to design international focus
groups for you. But there is a more cost-effective and efficient solution:
Why not go directly to the potential buyers in these new markets via the
Web?
Address new markets with lower risk
With search engine marketing you can greatly simplify this process while
insulating yourself from the potential cost of entering foreign markets.
Imagine communicating one-on-one with your new customer base and gaining
valuable feedback without having to set up a physical office in that country?
It can be done.
Expanding to Canada, Europe or into emerging markets?
Here is an example that will illustrate this point: you are a US-based
software company wanting to expand into Canada. This should be easy enough,
right? The current US site should be able to cover all of this traffic
plus Canadians speak the same language. However, the online world is more
complex than that. There is a Canadian version of Google that serves Canadian
results that are quite different from the US version. And to rank well
here, it is vital to have a separate Canadian domain that ends in .ca
rather than .com.
Another example of foreign market entry via search engine marketing is
a US medical device firm that would like to penetrate the European market.
How do they go about determining if this new market is, in fact, ready
to purchase their devices? By focusing on the largest language segment
in Europe, the German-speaking market, they can cover approx. 100 Million
potential customers in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. Again, local
websites would be set up that will be ranked preferentially by local search
engines. The web content would be rewritten to mirror German search terms
that yield reasonable traffic.
Search Engine Marketing lowers your threshold to entry
The same strategy can be applied to test and ultimately service emerging
foreign markets, such as China, Russia and India. Thus, search engine
marketing can be used as a highly effective market research tool to do
the initial scouting before setting up an office presence in a foreign
country.
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