Regardless of what you and your company do, content marketing is the perfect fit for hitting the international market. These five methods are proven to support companies big and small through international success.
1. Write What You Know
It’s old advice, but there’s nothing better for content marketing than writing what you already know. It’s likely that if you’re in or entering the international market, you’re an expert on what you do to some extent. Content marketing relies on providing high-quality information that’s valuable to the reader.
Who does this already? KISSmetrics and Close.io both publish content frequently on their industry and their company. While Close.io focuses on SaaS and KISSmetrics is a software provider they both give free advice and information from expert sources: themselves.
2. Make Your Content Easy to Access
Take a page from TED and make your content easily accessible. Whether you’re listening to the TED radio hour podcast, reading a TED article on their site, or a transcript of a TEDx speech on forbes.com accessing their content is easy.
Any SEO consulting firm will suggest posting your content in various places, and we couldn’t emphasize this enough for international companies. Regionally, not every city or country relies on the internet as their primary source of information. You must cater to the greater masses in areas where you aim to have an impact.
Content marketing doesn’t stop at posting on your website. Submit your posts to authority websites or news sites as a professionally written piece from a subject matter expert. Many sites will happily link to your website and mention your company name throughout. The same is said for newspapers that are quick to mention companies and professionals who contribute.
3. Scale Your Marketing Campaigns
Content marketing follows the same rules as any other marketing vein and scalability is essential. The Marriott, for example, uses content marketing to keep their name alive in the midst of third-party hotel booking agencies. To do this, they offer a mix of entertaining content and informative content.
How they scale their marketing campaigns depends on the region and time of year. Through heavy vacationer seasons, they focus on content that is easy and fun to read. During the months busy with people traveling for work purposes, they shift their focus to informational content on traveling and scale back their entertaining side.
4. Give it Away
When you operate anything free internationally can go a long way. First, you’re helping out those who aren’t international. Second, you’re increasing your exposure online. Finally, quality content marketing will establish you as an authority.
An outstanding example of this is the Business Trends and Insight annual report from American Express. They have internal information aggregated and assembled into a report that most people can understand, but they also take a look at their credit card industry as a whole.
The point is, they need the research internally for decision-making purposes, but they were in no way required to share their findings from industry data. They were also not required to update their report year after year, but they do. Because of this, they are the authority in credit cards information internationally.
5. Be Aware and Wary of Cultural Differences
Without a doubt, you would address an American audience far differently than how you would address an audience of Japanese business persons. So how do you hit every audience? You don’t.
Instead of trying to make everyone happy with one piece of content you should prepare your staff to cater to various cultures trends and traditions with multiple content posts. Given the time of year, you might write about Mexican independence, Thanksgiving, or Belgian National Day.
Being aware of cultural differences will guide you and your company through your market better. But, giving each culture some individualized attention will help you avoid the pitfalls of international marketing as well.
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