06/11/2021
By Tony Sabour 01 Nov 2021
The international business-to-business marketplace is changing. While this may not come as a surprise, the way things are evolving might serve as a wake-up call for SMEs in Britain, especially exporters.
That’s because, over the past two years, there have been some rather interesting shifts, not just in how international B2B buying decisions are happening, but also in who’s responsible for them. the global B2B audience is now younger and online.
Google survey among others found that 93% of B2B buyers use the internet during the global and even domestic B2B research process.
For a ‘Global Britain’ and the UK exporting SME, these rapidly changing dynamics pose many challenges. Chief among them is the language challenge and the search marketing (search engines) challenge.
25% of the global internet audience uses English, followed by a fast-growing Chinese speaking audience (19% as of January 2020), Followed by Spanish, Arabic, Indonesian, Portuguese, and French). It is also worth noting that more than 90% of global economic growth is occurring in those non-English speaking regions/countries (South East Asia, South America, Africa, China, Mexico, Turkey, etc). For UK exporters, this means there are vast export opportunities to be found in these fast-growing, non-English speaking markets.
Having the ability to communicate to a whole new international audience in their own language will undoubtedly yield results not only in a financial sense but also in terms of marketing and creating awareness of your brand, service or product.
A multilingual website in the grand scheme of things is probably one of the most effective ways of marketing your company, capturing new users, building relationships with new clients and giving your brand an international outlook.
To be effective a multilingual website must have professionally translated content. Not only that, it must also be optimised, localised for the target audiences and submitted to Google in different languages, and also to other Search Engines as well.
For example, to reach buyers in South and Central America your website must have at least a page in Spanish and a p[age in Portuguese (Brasilian) that summarise your profile, products and services, some images/video, contact details, and links to your other channels or social profiles. These pages must also contain minimum optimisation (Title, Metadata/description, few keywords, images names and ALT description) in Spanish and Portuguese, and must be submitted to Google.
To reach the Russian speaking world (Russia, central Asia, some Baltic states, and even 1.5m Israelis) you need another page in Russian submitted to both Google and Yandex (the Russian Search Engine). Your Mandarine page must be primarily submitted to Baidu (85.41% of the Chinese search) and Sogou (5.19%) search engines
Many Exporting SMEs do not have the resources, competencies or time to globalise their content marketing and search marketing. Luckily, there is Brexport, a multilingual exporters’ directory that does just that. You can have your content in 11 languages (85% of global internet users) and submitted to Google (in 11 languages), Bing, Yahoo, Yandex (Russian), Baidu & Sogou (Chinese).
What’s more, you can have all that done in 2 weeks for as little as £180/year.per subscription
Check Yandex search engine. You can tray: “British exporters of cheese” or its Russian equivalent “Британские экспортеры сыра” try it a couple of times.
UK Export challenges: the language and search marketing dimensions. How to give your business a global presence by using Brexport services.
