Starting up your own business in the middle of a global economic downturn may seem like insanity, but in reality the recession has created a myriad of opportunities for smart entrepreneurs with a truly Unique Selling Point (USP), a clever marketing strategy and an eye for the internet.
For most start-up companies, the point of departure is the local market, and if they find success there, then they’ll look at a gradual expansion into foreign markets. But with the global spread of internet access, this no longer need be the case. There’s money to be made all over the world – in fact, worldwide e-commerce grew by 12.9% in the past year. Any Jack or Jill with a great idea can create a global company from their bedroom with little more than a computer, an internet connection and a little savvy with regards to multilingual website design and online marketing strategies.
In fact, basing your business almost entirely online makes the most sense of all, as you can get a business up and running for very little initial outlay, which is crucial for most start-up businesses operating on minimal capital. You can also market your products and brand very effectively for very little expense, by using Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and Pay-Per-Click (PPC) strategies. SEO means, at its most basic, ensuring that the most popular keywords used to search for products like yours are placed prominently in your titles and introductory copy, so that the search engine bots will pick up these terms when scanning your page and boost you up the search rankings. This is especially useful for non-English language search engines, as there is far less keyword saturation on non-English pages, thereby giving your website a better chance of reaching top of the rank.
PPC advertising is the other key online marketing strategy, and it requires minimal expense to figure out how to maximise your Return on Investment (RoI). By setting up PPC advertising campaigns across a range of search engines and with a range of specific keywords, you can then set your monthly budget for PPC advertising to a nominal amount, say €20, and then at the end of each month look at the results of which keywords and engines brought in the most click-through traffic and thus tailor your campaign and expenditure accordingly.
The next step to online business success is to take advantage of the internet’s global reach and expand your concept of your potential client base beyond your national boundaries and out into the world. English may be the mother-tongue of the internet, but today more than 78% of internet users speak a first-language other than English– in fact, Chinese speakers are rapidly about to overtake English speakers, with 384 million Chinese-speaking internet users gunning for the 478 million English speakers (Internetworldstats.com).
Add to those facts research that found that 85% of consumers won’t buy a product if they can’t access information about it in their first language (Common Sense Advisory, 2006), and you have a powerful argument for localising your web presence for each international market you plan to target.
The next question, then, is where internationally would there be a potential market for your products? Figuring out where to target your online marketing efforts is absolutely essential, as to effectively reach each of those individual markets you will need to create individual localised Top Level Domains for each one; so, for instance, you’ll have your www.mybusiness.ch, then for China www.mybusiness.cn, and www.mybusiness.in for India, etc.
This is where it helps again to operate solely online – you can open an office in each of these countries with just one local employee at a computer at the other end, to advise on language, tone, website design, local consumer behaviour and effective marketing strategies. It’s absolutely essential to make sure that your website design and language-use is unrecognisable from that of a local company – internet users are savvy, and if your website is difficult to navigate or contains copy that has grammatical errors or uses outmoded or irrelevant terminology then there’s no chance they’ll be handing their details over for a purchase.
If you don’t have the capital to be opening up offices in each target country then your next best step is to work with freelance translators to make sure that your copy is perfect for each market – you want to avoid any potential translation embarrassments, such as when American chicken entrepreneur Frank Perdue’s slogan ‘It takes a tough man to make a tender chicken’ was translated into Spanish for Mexican billboards, apparently without consulting any native Spanish speakers, for the resulting caption informed bemused Mexican readers that ‘It takes a hard man to make a chicken aroused.’
It can also help to hire a company that specialises in website localisation and multilingual SEO – while there may be some initial expense involved, consider that the Localization Industry Standards Association found recently that each dollar invested in localisation reaped a $25 return, and you’ll see why going online and global with your business is not only a smart way to save money, it’s also the smartest way to make money.
About the author:
Christian Arno is the founder and managing director of global translation provider Lingo24, which works across four continents. Follow Christian on Twitter: @Lingo24chr.
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