Andrew Goodman of Page Zero Media is moderating.

Canadian/International Marketing Panel

Anne Kennedy is up first, from Beyond Ink

  • Why should you care about International Marketing?
    • North America is only 12% of internet users in the world
    • Google NA has 75% market share, and it’s even higher in other markets at 80-90%
  • Google
    • Search factors:
      • Language. You need a native speaker to catch nuances in localization efforts
      • Keyword research
      • Ad copy and landing pages
      • Shopping carts and payment systems are not all created equal. There’s Impeza in Africa for example
  • Not Google
    • Russia: Yandex is leader, and they clearly want to expand with recent office openings in US and UK. They have an easy to use PPC interface
    • China: Baidu is king. You need an acct in Phoenix’s nest to be able to buy ads, but you can only get it through a Baidu rep
    • Keys to ranking in these engines?
      • Language
      • Important content first b/c engines only crawl first few lines
      • Local Iinks
      • Hosting in china for Baidu
  • Other considerations
    • In Hong Kong/Taiwan, Google and Yahoo are more popular. But in PRC (People’s Republic of China) Baidu rules.
    • In South Korea, they have Naver, which puts high emphasis on social and blogging content
    • Daum is another engine in Korea which prefers social/blogging content and places less emphasis on traditional organic strategies
  • Other interesting facts:
    • In South Korea, cyworld is the leader, not Facebook
    • Yahoo Japan is mostly owned by Google for organic listings, but you can use both Google and Yahoo to advertise in ppc
    • Latin America loves video
    • Kenya has high mobile use, 50% of facebook users are on everyday
  • Takeaways:
    • 88% of world is not North America
    • Google and Facebook are not top everywhere
    • Mobile, SMS and video are big opportunities in international markets

Next is Ezra Silverton of 9th sphere

  • He starts with a quick overview of online challenges for Canadians such as where should they host? Should they use .com or .ca? Should they show or hide their Canadian pride?
  • First step is to define corporate and website goals
    • What are they, really? Does everyone agree?
    • Who is your target market?
  • Next, think about structure
    • Information architecture needs to be consistent across international sites
    • Balancing Canadian and American content is a challenge, make sure you think about this
    • To compete in the US without losing Canadians, on page content is key
    • Decide on whether you’ll use domain extensions or subdomains, where you’ll host from, and whether or not you’ll use IP detection
    • Consider location and laws, remember the cloud does not exist in Canada!
  • Website architecture: He shared a very good slide of pros/cons in arch decisions which I will add when it’s available.
  • Other notes on architecture:
    • In Google, hreflang= tag tells crawler that there’s different versions of the website, and helps with duplicate content
    • Identify Language and location, but make sure you give the option to switch
      • Ex of sherweb.com showing French version in English search.

Next Ian McAnerin of McAnerin International

  • Starts by saying don’t just market to people, step into the life. Don’t just translate, engage.
    • Trust and confidence are key
  • A couple of quick opportunities:
    • Vietnam has had an 1800% increase in Internet usage recently
    • Poland is also strong and developing and is huge opportunity since most marketers ignore it.
  • It’s interesting to note that in countries where a Latin language is used (English, French, Spanish – anything with alpha characters) Google is king. In non Latin languages (China, Japan, Taiwan), the dominant engine is more likely to be a local engine like Baidu.
  • Think carefully about pop culture references and translation issues before you translate them.
    • He had a client who named their company “Up the creek” because it was literally in a nice location on a creek and they wanted to emphasize that. However, when they expanded to the US, they almost didn’t notice that “up the creek” means “in trouble” in the US. Lesson? Make sure you involve a native early!
  • Don’t do a global search campaign, do a bunch of coordinated local search campaigns!
    • Plan centrally
    • Synchronize globally
    • Execute locally
  • Sell in mature markets, brand in emerging markets
  • Never geolocate a search engine
  • Flags are for countries, not languages. Don’t make the mistake of using them as languages, or you’ll run into problems (with French Canadian and English Canadian for example)
  • Make the phrase “English site” go to the home page, but if you offer an option for “English”, make sure it just translates the page you are on and doesn’t bounce you back to the home page.
  • Never translate, localize!
  • Remember Québécois French is very different than European French
  • Timing is important in local markets depending on seasonality. For example, the tourism seasons starts at different times depending on whether you’re in the US, Canada, Germany, Australia, etc.