Using Economic and Social Media to Expand Sales Overseas

Coordinator: Welcome and thank you for standing by. At this time all participants will be
in a listen-only mode until the question-and-answer session. To ask a question at that time, please
press star then 1.
Todayís conference is being recorded. If you have any objections, you may disconnect
at this time. With that it is my pleasure to turn over todayís call to Ms. Roza Pace.
You may begin.
Roza Pace: Thank you very much and hello, everyone. Iím Roza Pace and Iím Senior International
Trade Specialist at the Trade Information Center. Kelly Holloway my colleague in the
Trade Information Center will join us today to assist with the event.
The Trade Information Center is part of U.S. Commercial Service at the Department of Commerce.
We are very pleased to continue today with our Basic Guide to Exporting Webinar series.
It is an 18-part series delivering information on some of the fundamentals of exporting to
make sure that our exporters find the right markets, have the right export plan, do appropriate
due diligence and make yourself visible to their clients and get paid.
Iíd also like to welcome our presenters, all U.S. Commercial Service clients and now
theyíre Webinar participants in exporting community who are joining us today from all
across the U.S. for todayís Webinar on using e-commerce and social media to increase your
international sales.
We are very happy to note that we are having today a very diverse group of participants.
This free Webinar today is one of the series and is brought to you as part of the National
Export Initiative. Just a couple of brief housekeeping announcements before we get to
the meat of the matter today.
You will see the URL on the welcome slide where you can find a schedule of our future
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I say will put you in the queue to have your line taken off mute to ask your questions.
You also will have the opportunity to type-in your questions on your computer.
Now Iíd like to introduce our speakers. Todayís presenters will be Mr. Laszlo Horvath, President
of Active Media and (Larry Smith), Director of Business Development in Zeons Global, Inc.
We are very excited to have them with us today.
Between the two speakers, they will cover two separate but interrelated topics. Laszlo
will talk about how to make your company more visible on the Web and (Larry) will talk about
how you can become better connected with your clients who increasingly are moving towards
mobile applications.
Laszlo in particular will focus todayís presentation on how you can increased understanding of
your international customer by analyzing how they search your products and services, how
many of them are looking for your solutions, and about your competitors, what your competitors
are doing about it online.
He will also give you advice on how to attract international buyers to your Website and optimize
search engines for the international market. Following Laszloís remarks, you will hear
(Larry)ís presentation. Laszlo again as I say is the President of Active Media and his
company motto is can you afford not to be found on the Web?
Laszloís mission is to help exporters to be present on top of the search engines. Laszlo
without further ado Iíd like to turn over the phone and looking forward to your presentation.
Laszlo Horvath: Roza, thank you so much for the introduction. Hello, everybody. It is
my absolute delight to meet with an audience so diverse and exciting like todayís audience.
We have manufacturers, we have service companies from all corners of the United States and
the world and also agencies, governments that help them to export at different levels.
As Roza mentioned, our motto is can you afford not to be found? Well, thatís a rhetorical
question because obviously when you have customers who are looking for your products and services,
you simply have to engage with those customers; otherwise, two things can happen.
One, they connect with your competitors; two, you donít book that revenue that you never
knew you lost so this is a critical subject, finding those customers who are in the moment
of their need, the highly motivated customers and use the search engines as your virtual
sales force.
Iíd like to introduce myself briefly. My name is Laszlo Horvath, President of Active
Media. I am one of those old, online characters who started about 15 now itís about 16 years
ago when businesses like some of yours had to be convinced to build a Website because
they didnít need it.
They already had fax machines and telephones and physical addresses. Now after everyone
built a Website comes the next question, okay, no one sees our Website. They thought that
if they build a Website, the sales will come, traffic will come and after a few more years,
it turns out that traffic became a key component to a success of a Website so thatís what
we do.
Here is a sample of some of our clients. We take pride in delivering the highest possible
dominant positions on the search engines results pages on our clients. You can see we have
large and small banking and manufacturing, entertainment and consulting clients from
all corners of the world so what is the subject of this quick discussion with the audience?
First of all, this is a huge topic, how to use the search engines which are the new operating
system of the Internet because this is how people find information.
Iíd like to submit to you as a student of the Internet universe that there will be some
points that I am going to emphasize and I am going to rush through a couple of other
slides to give you a flavor of where we believe in our 15 years practice the most important
touch points are to capture an international audience.
This is sort of one of those tricky questions, how many computers are there and how many
Webpages are out there? Itís a huge jungle out there. The estimates are ranging between
1 and 3 billions and the number of Webpages is simply when I finish this sentence, will
be probably another 100,000 more.
The way to look at this is just to see that clouds out there. Thereís a lot of discussion
about cloud computing. You can look at this discussion as using the worldís most powerful
computer systems, the worldís most powerful clouds to your marketing needs.
The key element, self-selected, motivated buyers find on their own terms their product
and services. That creates an environment that leads to the most cost-effective marketing
program known to any media which is digital marketing in general and search engine marketing
in particular.
You donít need to interrupt your potential customers with any kinds of sales message.
They are going to contact you on their own terms and this is an illustration of a Website
that is on the bottom of search engine results.
It looks like a Website but itís not going to take you where you want to go with your
business. Itís not going to bring in sales. Here is the online marketing pyramid. You
will notice that there is no traditional media in that mix, even the lowest return potential
in your digital marketing program delivers better results than any type of traditional
media.
The foundation of your online marketing pyramid is search engine optimization. When you show
up on top of a search engineís results page, then Google, Bing, Baidu, Yahoo says that
your company is the leader in that field.
Second one is social media presence when your customers are telling the world that your
product is great and they had a tremendous experience with you and if your positive comments
are a much higher number than the negative or neutral comments, you are a winner in the
social media space.
(Max want his) pay-per-click ads, when people are looking at content that is related to
your products and services, having these pay-per-click ads offering a call for action with a potential
discount drive international customers to your Website.
Then comes behavioral targeting when people who are likely buyers are connected to a marketing
program that delivers a strong sales message and last but not least, e-mail lists. This
is our online marketing pyramid. Any of these elements perform better than any other traditional
marketing program.
So why search? Simply because it is the most important activity online. Search is the Number
2 application right after using e-mail online although social media is taking over the e-mail
on the top of that list so the second and third activity - search and research - is
simply what people do online.
About 20%-25% of the searches are local-related and regardless of where your Website and where
your business is located, the majority of visitors to your Website come from a country
thatís other than yours.
And if you felt that all the information that you gather everyday is overwhelming, well
thereís no reason to grieve about that because even today roughly 30% to 50% of the results
are relevant to the searchers which means that you didnít miss the boat.
The message simply is donít just say what you want people to know about or to read about
but make sure that when you say it, you include traffic, include findability in the message
so letting people find what you have to say.
We call this the inward-looking approach versus the - we call this the outward-looking approach
- versus the inward-looking approach when you are just focused on your mission and your
product advantages versus how people search for you.
Why are we discussing this? Because your customer has changed. The search engines create an
environment where the browsing as an activity online has disappeared. Your browser is taken
over by the fast search box as high-speed Internet access became ubiquitous so having
Websites that are invisible for the search engines means that you are denying access
to your content.
One example of this is Chrome, Googleís browser which literally combines the browser bar with
the search box, makes it much faster to find information so one buzzword that Iíd like
you to take with you after this presentation from me, the buzzword is SERP, Search Engines
Results Pages.
This is the single-most important territory, the single-most important real estate in todayís
digital marketing world the search engines results pages. They are your first touch point.
The search engines results pages are your most effective marketing channel because thatís
where your customers are and thatís equally true for any of those diverse areas that this
audience is working at from quality loudspeakers to power washers or local governments.
In any environment and any business that you represent, the key question is how to stand
out globally in this very busy universe? These are three ways to stand out and dominate the
search engines results pages: SEO, Search Engine Optimization; SEM, Search Engine Marketing;
and Social Media Optimization, SOM.
These are the three channels that help you capture the international audience. You are
not alone in this quest. There are thousands and thousands of companies that are dedicated
to take advantage of the fact that online marketing expenditure is still lower than
traditional media expenditure simply because of the inertia in the marketing industry.
And Iím not going to go into these details just a quick example that television and online
roughly have the same significance in peopleís live about 12 hours a day are spent on TV
or online and the expenditure levels are still much lower online than in broadcast television.
This is the growth in expenditure on the Internet per year between 2002 and 2010.
As you can see, the growth is much higher in the Internet industry and 87% of marketers
today tell researchers that they want to increase their online presence in 2011 because they
understood that itís a huge force accelerator, increases the impact of other marketing programs
as well if you are found in this economy.
And one note for exporters, there is no easier way to find international customers than doing
the analysis of how those international buyers search for your products and services, how
many of them are out there and what the competition does about this. This is called the keyword
analysis which we affectionately in my business call mind-reading.
Reading the minds of your customers helps you tailor a message that captures their imagination.
Now that was the introduction and here comes a little bit of a detailed presentation agenda
about how to use your virtual global sales force.
Weíll talk very briefly about what is a search engine which sounds redundant but in my experience
itís always an interesting subject because most folks use it without knowing exactly
what that is.
And then weíll cover the three channels, SEO, pay-per-click and the social media optimization
and last but not least we are going to talk a few words about global usage trends and
weíll show a brief case study if we have time for that.
So why are search engines so successful? Because this is our answer to a sensory overload,
the thousands and thousands of marketing messages that we get. We live in the world of a digital
tsunami. According to the SCS Institute, we carry the load that is four times larger in
noise each day. Itís a scary number. Each day digital data, all the transactions worldwide
quadruple.
So as an illustration this is how your customers feel. Thatís the key to success of the search
engines because if you add some more load of information, thatís not going to help
your business to sell the products but when this person is actually looking for a solution,
maybe a trolley to carry all that data garbage, then you have a chance to interact and win
his or her business.
In a way you can look at search engine optimization as a way to get rid of all that redundant
noise and in a crystal clear format engage your customers and this is the evolution of
our industry, the acceleration is really scary.
If you look at these killer applications, one was AOL. Thatís where I started in 1995.
It took 15 years to reach close to 300 million users and the key to success was to create
a high-speed environment in the low-connectivity connection space so it was a virtual high-speed
environment.
Then Google came and took them 10 years to reach 350 million users. Essentially they
created the first social media program as well because thatís one of the success factors
of search engine visibility that the users own the answers since they typed-in a specific
question.
And thatís why Googles and Bings and Yahoos and Baidus and all the other search engines
endorsements means an undisputed third-party valuation. It must be true because itís on
top of the search engines and look at Facebook.
In five years they reached 500 million users. Today now they have about 600 million and
itís really effortless. You donít have to worry about spending time writing an e-mail.
Youíre always on and youíre always connected so there was an acceleration in our industry.
And, you know, the saying that you know our century we are very lucky because in this
hundred years that we live in, more is going to happen with mankind and technology than
in the past 100,000 years and it sounds like an exaggeration.
But if you look at the accelerating timeline, they might be right so the consequences, traditional
marketing is outdated because it happens on the terms of the marketers and they want to
interrupt you with a direct message versus the broadcast, the reverse broadcast model
where they customers initiate the contact.
And we live in the age of personalization. We might call it post-advertising because
the attention is so fragmented that people have no time to do a huge amount of traditional
media consumption and they do video gaming, they do online activities on their own terms
and thatís key to success if you ride that wave together with your customers.
Some real-time data from last year, social media expenditure is about close to $2 billion
in 2010. Online sales are about $40 billion-plus industry and online ad expenditure is about
$26 billion so this is not a baby industry anymore and we are just at the very beginning
of another growth curve right here in the social media online sales and online ad spending
arena.
So you are already global because the majority of your visitors are online. Message Number
3, if you donít have an international program on your Website, it means that you send away
the majority of the visitors coming to your Website.
So in order to maximize your search dominance, you do need to look at the international opportunities.
Roughly about 800 million-plus people are online. This is the number of searches per
years, about 61 billion searches per month and thatís growing.
By the way, folks who are addicted to social media platforms, they use more searches than
those who are not on social media so the world is really at your fingertips.
And doing a global program on the search engines essentially using the Internet what it was
invented for, the Internet is nothing else but a connectivity channel to connect anybody,
anywhere and these are the languages just on Google that you can capture.
Now think about all these markets where you can be virtually local in Latvian, Polish,
Portuguese, Romanian, you name it. You can be as local as the store next door to those
international customers.
Here is the rush to get online. These are the latest numbers that I can actually trust
roughly. Asia is the largest chunk of online users. There is Europe and here is the Americas,
North America and Latin America.
And here is essentially the same data by percentages, roughly about 40% of the Internet users are
in Asia, about 25-26 are in North and South America - the Americas - and about a quarter
of the users are in Europe, a little more and the rest is a smaller percentage.
And this is another interesting number, the penetration of Internet access. North America
is the highest. The numbers are a little bit skewed because often times you see different
usage patterns in Europe than in North America for example because people use the Internet
at work or at academic institutions.
Here the number is essentially much higher because these are just the home users versus
the Internet cafÈ users and also the mobile users are not included so these numbers are
much higher. Thatís particularly true in Africa which has a very low home usage percentage,
about 5% but with the mobile platforms itís a much higher number.
So you essentially can capture the majority of users on any continent and here is just
the reach of one network - paid advertising content network - about close to 600 million
people just on Googleís network and 92% of Latin America, 88% of the users in Asia/Pacific
and 91% of Europe can be reached so here comes some details about these three channels.
As I am rushing into the finish of the presentation, what is a search engine? Essentially itís
a database where all the information is found by a crawler, put into an index which is a
hierarchy of results and the algorithm determines who is Number 1 and who is 2,000,736.
This is the single-most important slide of the presentation. The organic or natural results
are the crown jewels. This is where you get the third-party validation. This is where
your undisputed leadership lies.
And these are the pay-per-click programs where you can supplement your digital leadership
by offering a special deal where you drive customers who are bargain hunters and there
could be bargain hunters in the B-to-B field as well.
They donít want free shipping. What they want is a free case study or some perceived
value-added service. Search engine optimization, we are just going to run through these benefits
and please do let me know if you have questions about this.
Itís essentially presenting your case to the search engine spiders so you get a dominant
placement at the end of the process. Essentially he has three relevant points. One is the mind
reading, when you really understand your customer, how they search for your products and services,
how many of them are out there and what the competition does about this.
After you know this, you essentially have raw data for a digital marketing plan. You
know what the market wants from you. You know the size of the market and you know the competitive
landscape.
After that you are ready to modify or build your Website thatís Phase 2 the page level
deliverable when your Website becomes an extension of the search, of the search engineís results
pages.
And the third and simply the most important component is the link popularity building
and that subject alone of how to put your Website in the larger context of the Internet
deserves a multi-day discussion and Iím more than happy to talk about those technical details
one-on-one or in the Q&A session.
Thatís the area where you essentially beat your competitors, all things equal so if the
pricing is the same and the quality of your product is the same, the link popularity building
is going to create the gift that keeps on giving.
Here is typical results experience and now comes the description in the presentation
of the pay-per-click advertisements where you buy clicks, you pay every time someone
clicks on these ads. You donít pay when they just review it but they donít click and here
are the advantages of doing pay-per-click advertising though most of the pay-per-click
users use Google.
The majority of them also uses Yahoo so 60% use Yahoo, 95% use Google and there was also
a significant audience for other search engines. It depends on which market you are targeting.
Some search engines are dominant. The exceptions - the three notable exceptions - where Google
is not dominant is China where Baidu is the big player.
Russia where Google doesnít really have a huge market share and the Czech Republic.
The rest of the world is dominated by Google and itís about 70% in the United States and
15% is Bing and 15% is Yahoo. This is another laundry list of comparisons of how search
engine optimization compares to a pay-per-click program, advantages and disadvantages.
I like these laundry lists because you can use them as checkmarks and search engine optimization
comes hand-in-hand with social media optimization when the positive comments come up on top
of the results pages and weíll talk more about this during (Larry)ís presentation
and here is a quick key study of how to use search engine optimization creatively.
One of our clients is a hotel chain, Magical Cusco Tours and they wanted to stand out - they
understood so their - they understood the advantage of standing out in the social media
space so their instructions for us was Laszlo, make us stand out in relevant results pages.
So we created a program. We essentially created a search engine optimization program for them
when they received 300-plus top level placements and also an ongoing pay-per-click program
for special deals in traveling to Cusco. They also created a solution where they realized
that people are searching for two completely different products that they did not offer.
One was spiritual tours to go to the Inca tour and meditate. The other one was culinary
tours that became the most profitable ventures for them. The strength of networks, when you
work with partner companies, the effect of search engine optimization increases.
This is called the ecosystem, the digital ecosystem so when you have partners and you
create a link program between those partners, the effects of search engine optimization
multiple and this is a disruptive technology when a smaller company can become a significant
international player and last message here is control your digital footprint.
Control your search engine organic results, create a pay-per-click program and create
a dominant search engine and social media optimization program because there are three
options there.
Either you control your digital footprint, what people think about you and what people
say about you in addition to how your message shows up on the search engines results pages,
thatís the best case scenario.
Second scenario is kiosks. It goes just chaotically whichever information the spiders find relevant
will come up on top and the third one is when your digital space is controlled by a competitor,
thatís the least favorable option.
And thank you so much for your time. I apologize for rushing through this presentation but
I am delighted to answer during the Q&A or after that and I hand it over to the social
media expert, (Larry).
Rosa Pace: Okay, (Larry), before you speak, thank you, Laszlo for a wonderful presentation,
informative and hopefully folks will find some useful ideas and thank you for the opportunity
for companies to follow-up with you with their questions and please also understand that
we like to remind you that during this presentation, you are able to type your questions by clicking
on Q&A tab at the top of the presentation and let me briefly introduce (Larry).
(Larry Smith) as I say is our next presenter. We are very excited to have (Larry) to talk
about shifting consumer B-to-B approach towards e-commerce (stat upon) the evolution of international
business, marketing and sales, talk a bit about value of social media strategy to your
international business and other topics. (Larry), the floor is yours.
(Larry Smith): Thank you, Roza, I appreciate it. Good afternoon, everyone, and weíre very
honored to be part of this Webinar. Welcome to Zeons Globalís international business
social media overview. A breakthrough in export marketing and sales that helped you engage
new international customers in markets with products and services.
During this brief presentation, Iíll explain how social media can help your company create,
expand and engage new market overseas, increasing profitability and improve brand awareness.
First let me go over the agenda which is obviously an introduction to the corporate overview;
social media defined; the evolution of business, marketing and sales; past present and future
trends and challenges; capitalizing on exports with social media; summary of benefits; and
then lastly how you can contact us.
Iíd appreciate it if we could keep all questions and answers to the end but there is a chat
window and my colleague (Adam King) will be happy to answer any questions you have in
the chat window.
Many U.S. companies struggle when it comes to expanding internationally. Itís a challenge
to enter foreign markets, launch new products or simply cater to foreign requests. Firms
that donít do well overseas typically donít have a clearly articulated or developed strategy,
a database of customers or prospects, multi-lingual staff and literally no brand awareness in
the target market.
Whatever your situation, itís difficult to get enough traction with decision-makers overseas.
Many firms try to develop an export department internally but it just failed to produce the
desired results.
With little to no export department when a firm gets busy, pipeline activity slows, leads
get dropped or allowed to get cold and the firm experiences the all-too-recognizable
revenue roller coaster which deters them from focusing on developing and nurturing the lucrative
markets overseas.
Thatís where we come in, Zeons Global. Zeonís Global is a multinational company which assists
and facilitates the export of U.S.-manufactured goods into emerging international markets
in Latin America, Caribbean, Africa and the Middle East.
Zeons Global is an integrated company characterized by substantial inter-group and inter-sector
cooperation in research manufacturing and marketing of products incorporating similar
component materials manufactured at common internal sources.
Zeons Global is a U.S. conglomerate with businesses categorized into agriculture, asset acquisitions,
consumer goods, export and export management and training, media consulting, power fuel
and Zeons Global is renown both globally and locally.
Zeons Global has a physical footprint in 27 countries servicing more than 455,000 customers
serviced by eight business groups. Zeons Global has been evolving to become the United Statesí
largest, most diversified public company.
Our decades of success and strong reputation provide from our proven ability to provide
high-level professional solutions and consumer products coupled with outstanding consumer
service that deliver results. Within this century, Zeons Global has built this foundation
on the export of Made in USA goods and services.
Social media: what is it? Who is it for? Why care? Is it about everything people have said
about social media? Social media is just basic communication like what you do every day.
Executives and probably most social media experts often focus too much on a challenge.
Facebook, Twitters, forums, blogs, Podcasts, pictures and videos are just channels, a bridge
to communicate with targeted audiences. The thing about these channels is languages. They
can be mastered easily but content and value of the conversation is all that matters.
(Seth Gody) said on his blog, ìItís a process, not an event.î In business, companies should
invest in social media for quick results. Itís a process to build relationships with
potential customers and maintain good relationships with existing customers.
Most brands and many agencies focus way too much on social media topics such as launching
a Facebook page, Twitter, creating apps and trying to create viral videos. Some might
get lucky and create (both) but itís very risky to be focused on tactics. Tactics should
come last, after building a solid foundation of brand image, personality and engagement
online.
Why invest in social media if itís just a process while there are other medias like
TV ads, magazine ads and online ads that shows quicker impact? There are tons of reasons
for it but the biggest reason would be can you afford not to?
In business, social media shouldnít play the role in direct selling. It should instead
influence viral conversations, build brand awareness, improve customer service and engage
your target as a friend. Think about it.
When making purchase decisions, would you trust a friend or an advertisement? With regards
to the images in this particular slide in the lower left-hand corner, you see four distinct
differences. (Barry Gillis) who we all know as a great survival expert says if you brain
works, you can survive almost anything.
We all sure know MacGyver. All he needed was a pen and a paper clip to make anything work.
Albert Einstein said the only source of knowledge is experience and what about those guys on
the Apollo mission who started out with the right stuff and thought it was a journey and
it became an adventure?
When you take all these plus by sharing it instantly around the world multiplying it
with people, you get the social technology based upon what we have today in the Twitter,
Facebook, YouTube, Wikipedia and others.
Letís talk about the big picture. Why do you want to go international? Over 23 trade
agreements have been created to decrease Americaís trade deficit. These trade agreements, NAFTA,
CAFTA and WTO to name a few have lowered many trade restrictions for U.S. products giving
U.S. exporters an unprecedented level of access to many international markets.
These reductions have helped all U.S. businesses. In the top there you see the world. All we
see is potential. Ninety-five percent of the worldís population and two-thirds of total
worldís purchasing power are located outside the United States. Imagine the potential as
the worlds becomes more integrated and develops similar like product.
Next one. Sorry about this. Okay. Sorry about that. The economic growth. Consumer preferences
shaped primarily by incomes, changing lifestyles and evolving cultural preferences largely
determine the items available in stores in different markets.
As you see there to the right, itís an engagement life-cycle of economic shifts, social technologies
and globalization which affects it all and the association there is that if youíre a
small business and dealt with quickly enough, you run the risk of a threat of not being
able to react as you move forward.
To generate straight interest with potential export markets, you need to first determine
what messages and products will resonate and then articulate those messages and products
and their value.
By creating relationships with Tweets, Facebook updates, LinkedIn connections and custom e-mails,
all of these collectively build an initial relationship with the target market and audience
creating positive brand experiences which becomes potential sources of revenue.
Most prospects are not ready to buy right away and sophisticated overseas buyers will
only engage your products when they see the benefits of doing so and when they are good
and ready. Using social media will allow you to nurture and enhance the relationship with
specific messages delivered for its different types of customers that is right for them.
If you look at the bar graph of the world Internet penetration, you will immediately
notice that the emerging regional markets depict greater opportunities in developing,
nurturing and engaging international customers with social media tools as a cost-effective
and important source of product and service development.
Now look at the time spent on Facebook versus Google. Mind you this is just representative
of Americans online. You can ascertain it from the phenomenal growth of social media
as a palatable medium to engage future customers, clients and partners that is a viable medium
to access new customers and markets if done correctly.
And in the world Internet penetration rate, you will see as Laszlo already mentioned how
basically Asia and Africa are so far behind North America, Oceana and Europe as a very
good opportunity to start going internationally.
Past, present and future trends, the value of social media strategy for your international
business. How did we do business in the past? Well, we all did mailings or phone calls and
things. How do we it today? E-mail lists. Some of us are still doing phone calls and
even mailings.
What is the future? Well, the future is that social media. If we utilize the social media
tools to harvest international customers, you really need to have a mindset in place
that is not a magical solution that will produce immediate results.
It is a prolonged effort to solidify your brand presence. Businesses open to its customers
and partners and stakeholders, social media technology is about the ability to connect
with them for a collaborative action in a scalable and cost-effective manner.
By collaborating with the consumer, you create your business outfit with them, an outfit
they buy into. This often means cheaper and more effective service, products and communications
as well as deeper consumer loyalty.
Integrated international business development social media campaigns are designed to break
through directly to the consumer and create conversations that are valuable to them. The
multi-phased approach to social media not only creates qualified prospects and nurtured
relationships but it builds brand preference.
By including value and thought leadership in all communication, not only do potential
prospects know who you are but they can articulate what you can do for them.
As your communications are sustained over time, prospective clients wonít forget you.
Indeed, they will remember you at the elusive time of need and you will have top-of-mind
awareness that firms covet. Now top-of-mind awareness is great but itís great when customers
want to work with you.
Monetizing social media. As international business development in social media focuses
on communicating and developing your value and the prospect of generation and nurturing
process, prospects will not only remember you but theyíll look forward to doing business
with you.
Now with regards to social media monetarizing, so how do you monetize this media for your
business? Well, you set clear business goals. Social media itself is not a strategy. It
is a set of tools that help support a business strategy. Before investing resources into
social media, decide what you plan to achieve.
Ask yourself why your site exists. Do you sell online? Do you encourage store visits?
Your social media should do the same and it should be measurable. Itís not enough to
focus on number of site visits, fans or followers. Create paths of continuous participation.
Keep visitors engaged.
Donít stop the point of direction. For example, if a customer writes a review for a product
on your site, send him a follow-up e-mail encouraging them to answer other consumersí
questions about that product.
Upload your own product photos or write a product story. These interactions will also
encourage other consumers to participate. Engage everyone, not just contributors. Your
visitors, customers, experts and (imports) are the only ones who contribute and have
benefit from your community.
Engage employees by inviting them to answer visitor or customer questions. Have a spokesperson
for a celebrity endorser contribute a story about how they interact with your product.
Give suppliers and manufacturers access to your community so they can share their product
expertise.
Make your efforts contextually relevant. Everything a consumer sees should contribute to his or
her goals for the interaction. In other words, if people generally come to your site to buy
something, well online interactions should help them toward that goal.
The community should exist to support consumers. As a brand, you canít dictate what a consumer
buys but you can give them superior access to information that will help them evaluate
the products. The brand no longer dictates what a customer buys. Itís the experience
that we have in your valuation process.
Consumers get recommendations from friends, analyze peer reviews, and evaluate alternatives.
Help them do this in your community. Drive revenue not just with metrics. A recent survey
of CMOs showed that 81% of CMOs expect to link their annual revenues directly to their
social media investment in 2010.
Metric sales conversions, revenue and average order value, figures that track directly to
the bottom line are replacing metrics such as site traffic or page views. You can also
use your online community to improve customer support while decreasing customersí costs.
Summary of benefits. Getting a social media program is an exciting opportunity and a chance
to dramatically change the way you connect with consumers. It is a tool that allows you
to tap into conversations for more about how your brand is perceived, promote your product/service
in new ways and ultimately grow your business.
Often the things you learn a social media can inform your more traditional marketing
efforts as you engage directly with your audience and learn more about what makes them tick.
Social media while trendy is a fully mainstream communications tool.
Properly prepare your social media strategy including goals and measurement to ensure
you get the most out of your program. Taking a simple four-step approach to prepare for
the launch of a successful social media program can ensure that you set-up to interact in
social media venues before you get started.
This approach includes identifying your goals, finding your audience, setting your key performance
indicators, scheduling a resource management. Program building gives you a chance to focus
your efforts and to determine what kind of manpower you will be needing to support efforts.
You will also set-up your criteria for success in advance by creating a set of metrics. This
will take some of the uncertainty out of your social media program enabling you to know
when you are doing things right and when adjustments need to be made.
Our 10-step approach to a successful social media program is: listen to and observe what
the target audience is doing in social media; create a solid object that is relevant to
the brand of genuine interest; segment the target into tribes, give them something they
can join; allow them to engage via their preferred platform of choice, create multiple interfaces
to your community; make the experience better when shared; optimize your content for sharing,
particularly via newsfeeds and Twitter; use pay for media to get the ball rolling; take
advantage of extreme targeting by social networks; make sure you have the resources to manage
your community management and refresh the content; and lastly track the results and
optimize where necessary.
Enable, inspire, influence and engage. If you are a manufacturer of building materials,
industry machinery, automotive aftermarket accessories and vehicles, vitamins or supplements,
food products, apparel, aerospace, consumer goods or agricultural products seeing to expand
internationally and donít have the relationships or know-how in place and are looking to implement
a proven system instead of developing something internally, you donít have to go it alone.
Zeons Global international business development will be right here for you. The benefits are
extensive. All we see is growth potential. Exports growing three times faster sales here
in the U.S. of the worldís population and two-thirds of the total world purchasing power
are located outside the U.S.
Deepen relationships; by engaging the prospect you are deepening your relationship with them
and building an affinity for your brand. Having your prospects participate in a process will
create a value-added relationship that will translate into future sales dollars.
Integration into the marketing mix; once youíve properly defined your goals in levering social
media to interact with your prospects, integrating these activities into your overall marketing
fix is a sure-fire way to get measurable results for your marketing budget.
Thatís whatís great about this meeting is you can create specific landing pages that
draw traffic from these social media tools with direct marketing efforts to get a clearer
picture of ROI.
Ready, aim, fire. Once youíve mastered the art of communicating with your consumers,
the social media launch in new products becomes a science. Build the brand.
As you build your relationship with new customers with incentives, recognition and programs,
just any market share against the competition allows you to harvest opportunities in the
marketplace for the longer term.
The relationships, prospects and revenues that we have developed for our clients speaks
for themselves. We have developed thousands of new relationships, integrated millions
of new dollars in revenue and have been able to penetrate anywhere between 10 to 50% of
our clientsí target markets in over 27 different countries.
This is just representative of the types of companies we deal with. Every client is of
course different. We look forward to speaking with you and learning about your goals, markets
and needs.
Zeons Global benefits the U.S. companies that it represents through their established sales
network abroad. Dealing with Zeons Global allows access to their existing network and
resources to appoint distributors and dealers in select markets.
Zeons Global has the ability to handle all of the details of an export transaction. This
includes the know-how to handle inquiries, prepare quotations, enter orders, handle shipping
details, assist with country-specific obstacles and handle the international banking and payment
details.
Zeons Globalís greatest asset is its strength of connection to the international firms they
work with. We have the experience to select agents and distributors. Zeons Global can
also manage the foreign distribution network through its visits to the markets they distribute
into.
Traveling abroad for the first-hand experience also allows us to assess market conditions
and sales opportunities. If you choose to work with Zeons Global, the advantages you
will notice are quicker export sales.
Zeons Global has an established network of foreign agents and distributors. If your product
is ready for a particular market, you will have the built-in distribution system. Normally
we generate three to five deployments with decision-makers who are interested in building
a relationship.
Fewer expenses; companiesí out-of-pocket expenses will be less as most of the labor
expenses will only be realized upon successful appointment of a distributor and when the
orders are placed.
Time; Zeons Globalís dedication to its international sales, relationships and customer service
is a very important part of export sales. Zeons Global has the time and incentive to
develop export business. Even with the appropriate financed resources, you may lack the time
to focus on this because of other priorities.
Often this time is more appropriately spent on building domestic market and export details
are overlooked. Learning from those with experience, a great way to learn about export transactions
is by working with Zeons Global.
Use the opportunity to work together to learn how things are handled and thank you very
much for the time allotted for this presentation and we hope you do more of this in the future.
Roza Pace: Thank you (Larry) for this presentation. A lot of useful information of how companies
can use social media in their marketing strategy. Again we are approaching top of the hour.
We have a few minutes for question and answer. We appreciate everyone staying online and
I would like to turn over to operator to invite participants with any questions that they
may have.
Coordinator: Just a reminder, to ask a question please press star then 1. Please be sure to
unmute your phone and clearly record your name when prompted. Again thatís star then
1 and we will allow a few moments for any questions to come in.
Roza Pace: Now maybe since we are waiting for a question, perhaps my question is here
at the Department of Commerce we receive a lot of inquiries on exporting from small and
medium-sized companies that may be new to exporting or new to market and what kind of
a budget or manpower a small company should consider to really engage in both sort of
a Website part of the business, making it perfect and as well as the social media?
Either (Larry), or Laszlo, Iíd love to hear your comments or, you know, answer to that.
Coordinator: Excuse me, (Elizabeth Donnelly), your line is open.
(Elizabeth Donnelly): Yes, I was just interested to hear some specifics on how customers can
be reached outside the U.S. through social media or through SEO. I have a whole set of
social media that Iíve been using for a long time but I lack of a lot of international
customers. How can I reach to those and in an effective manner?
And in addition to that how do I search engine optimize for those international customers?
Laszlo Horvath: Is it okay if I start with the search engine optimization part and...
(Elizabeth Donnelly): Sure.
Laszlo Horvath: (Larry) can pitch in about social media. Well, the key is to understand
how different international customers are looking for your products and services, Elizabeth,
and itís relatively easy to find out and tying back to Rozaís question, itís not
that cost-prohibitive because a simple analysis of the keyword space where your search engine
optimization shop just like our logs-in to the log files of the search engines in the
given region that you are looking at.
And weíve done this in about 40 different languages on all continents and determined
the number of search queries in your field that will be an indicator of your future success
in your digital marketing effort in that particular language or languages or geographical areas.
And the competitive data, how many Webpages compete for that particular keyword phrase
or keyword group will indicate how competitive this space is going to be for you.
After you determine that, then you create a digital marketing program to capture that
type of an audience by creating quality content in a search engine optimized fashion and then
you apply additional marketing tools based on the online marketing pyramid that was part
of my presentation earlier.
So understanding your digital market space in that particular area that you are targeting
is key so before you build a Website that is localized to that market, you need to know
what those customers want from your company. Does that answer your question?
(Elizabeth Donnelly): Yes, it helps. Now when you talk about - Iím sorry, I got distracted
with that call - but take to (unintelligible) what needs to be customized in a language
that hosts the potential customer should be or keep it in English and itís sufficient?
Laszlo Horvath: Itís a very good question. The answer is both. As you know, English is
not one language. In our practice, English is one version is the North American version
that we speak here. The other one is the U.K. English and then there is the Australian English
and then there are all kinds of international English versions there as well that have to
be taken into consideration.
So depending on your needs, you may consider a multi-language optimization in English and
in addition to that, if you look at the size of your markets in different foreign areas,
Spanish is a huge market online. China itself has over a hundred million online users.
There are huge markets in Europe. The EU is a fragmented marketplace that you can target
using international English to a large extent with the exception of France where you need
to do the French language optimization. Germany uses equally German and English. Spain has
to be done in Spanish.
Italian if your market is appropriate for that market so depending on your priorities,
start with multi-lingual English optimization, the different versions of the English language
because thatís the easiest.
And after you have warmed-up to optimization in English, then you can enter one of the
largest international markets and continue from there because search engines give an
unfair competitive advantage to the local language sites if you have letís say a targeted
marketing program for Spain, if your Website is hosted in Spain and itís in Spanish, you
come up way ahead of competitors that have a generic site in English.
(Elizabeth Donnelly): Okay. Thank you.
Laszlo Horvath: My pleasure.
Coordinator: I show no other questions at this time.
Roza Pace: Okay, can you hear me, operator?
Coordinator: Yes, I can hear you.
Roza Pace: Yes, yes, hello. Yes, and a question that perhaps I have to either of the speakers
is many of the listeners may be representatives of small and medium-sized companies and the
question that I have, what would you recommend advice in terms of resources that they should
spend on both social media as well as Website optimization?
Is this something that they should tackle by themselves in-house or should they consider
external players to help them with or both or it depends and so any comments that you
can have on that and especially it applies to international sales.
Like for instance, you know, you mentioned Chinese markets. You have a Baidu as opposed
to Google. How do you make yourselves visible there in China? Do you use Baidu or what and
so thank you.
(Larry Smith): Well, since you have asked the search engines Roza particularly in China,
the search engine optimization process is when you target the Chinese market, we are
targeting the Chinese Baidu search engine algorithm so it needs to be in Chinese so
obviously if you want to serve that marketplace, you need someone in-house who is we call that
the champion of that market.
And that particular person has to speak Chinese to understand the intricacies of that marketplace.
Otherwise you are going to get a lot of disappointed potential customers coming to you and not
getting the right quality answers.
Often times we get the question shall we use Googleís translator software? Thatís a very
good solution for short-term ad hoc immediate needs but please do not rely on technology
alone without the human resources to target a significant market.
So the answer to the question is you need to allocate resources that are market-specific
so if you are targeting letís say Latin America, you need someone who is a foreign speaker
in that marketplace.
And the resources that you have to allocate to this, a search engine optimization is not
that expensive because essentially after you did a search engine optimization program,
you just maintain your visibility so you donít need to spend a lot of money.
Pay-per-click is a little bit more expensive and social media expenditure depends on the
penetration of the social media space in that particular country. For example in Brazil,
I canít see a digital marketing program without the social media components since they are
one of the leaders in social media visibility.
In other countries that are less advanced in that field, you may get by with an aggressive
search engine optimization program followed by pay-per-click or social media, depending
on your budget because in an ideal case scenario, if you are a small company you want to have
a return on your investment that helps you finance future needs.
And thatís why if you apply the online marketing pyramid and start with the search engine optimization,
you essentially get the lowest possible investment and you get the highest return for that and
then you move on to the next level and then to the next level.
Roza Pace: Thank you very much, (Larry).
(Larry Smith): My pleasure.
Roza Pace: Now I just wanted in the meantime while we may wait for a couple additional
questions just to let you know that Commerce-wide you could follow us using social media. There
is a blog at the http://blog.trade.gov. You could follow us on Twitter. I will send you
the links to that.
You could also - thereís an important, you know, aspect of selling online Internet using
social media - that we could not find some information and hopefully is useful information
on our expert.gov Website when you go to export.gov/sellingonline.
There are different things to think about. One thing that we were not discussing today,
we assume that you do have a good Website, that itís exciting and interesting because
to optimize Website without good Website is not particularly necessarily helpful.
Again so you have to have your strategy and presence which is independent of the tactics
as we were talking about too. Now donít know if we have any other questions here. If you
have any additional questions, feel free to call us and contact us and contact our speakers.
And weíll send you e-mail with the presentations as well as with the recording of the presentation
in case you have additional questions and here in a tick we can help you with not only
this topic but if you have any questions related to any aspect of exporting all the way from
how to find your agents, buyers, distributors, how what kind of expert documentation you
need, you need to find out about a lot of export-related events and we do have a presence
in every state here as well as in almost 80 different countries.
So weíre one big networking organization in addition to other sort of services that
we can provide to exporting companies so if you just remember export.gov and 1-800-USA-TRADE,
weíll either have an answer for you or weíll connect you with someone who does have an
answer and thank you again to the speakers and to everyone who dialed-in. Thanks.