Global Digital Marketing

February 5th, 2009 by Jon Morris, Founder and CEO

Note: This post is the first in a series about how to optimize for a global internet marketing campaign.

One of the great benefits of the Internet as a commercial platform is that it has worldwide reach. Artisans in India can sell their goods in London. Firms in Mumbai can create successful businesses selling services to customers in Chicago. Resorts in Costa Rica can book reservations from travelers in Toronto. The web has clearly become a democratizing economic medium for businesses the world over.

So what does a company with global reach need to consider when it comes to global digital marketing?

Language

Vacation or holiday? Police or bobbies? Simply translating your website from one language to another is not enough to effectively speak to regional audiences the world over. When devising a global digital marketing plan, it is important to take into account the variances in language and the culturally acceptable norms for specific markets. Messages that make sense in Miami may not make sense in Mumbai. Make sure that your online marketing team is capable of adapting your messaging to the given locale.

Not Always Google

While Google is a hugely successful company and the dominant player when it comes to online search, it is not necessarily the highest trafficked search engine in every part of the world. In China, for example, Baidu captures roughly 60% of the search market. In Japan, Yahoo! leads the way in market share. The point is that you need to know where your audience searches if you are to employ a successful global online marketing strategy. You can’t just assume that Google is number one.

Web Address

Deciding on a web address is one of the most important architectural issues when it comes to global digital marketing. Some companies use subdomains or subdirectories to distinguish their different language versions, while others use specific country domain extensions (such as .co.uk and .ca). These decisions have important implications for both paid search and search engine optimization, as well as for international marketing as a whole.

In the next post, we will discuss more specific details on how to do global search engine optimization for sites that need to take international optimization into account for organic optimization.

Rise Interactive is a Chicago-based Internet marketing company providing insight into global Internet marketing for Fortune 1000 clients.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, February 5th, 2009 at 2:21 pm and is filed under Global Interactive Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.