Also like many other entrepreneurs, however, the idea of taking your product to foreign audiences might easily seem daunting and far-fetched to you. You might believe (understandably) that attracting foreign clients involves huge marketing budgets, fancy advertising agencies and having a giant brand built over a large number of years.
While this might have been the inevitable truth in the past, when the world was still big and communicating with foreign clients was hard, it is surely not the case today where the world has become, as some people neatly put it, "no more than a one big city".
There is a huge variety of techniques that you can use to attract foreign clients with little marketing costs and below are 5 of the most popular and effective.
1. Content Marketing
To make clients you first need to attract visibility and there are mainly 2 ways you can do this:
- pay money or
- offer value
If your product or service has any information to offer that interest people (your typical client) in any way , than you can make good use of this. By writing articles and posting them on your blog or social media (both free or cheap) you can be sure to gain website visits and put your brand in front of a lot of people while building trust among your audience.
Make sure to use Facebook and LinkedIn groups to leverage the power of already existing large groups of people (however, always be sure to focus on offering value through your content and not machine-gunning everyone with your adverts). Using your blog, you can also capture email addresses which can then be used for smart email-marketing campaigns.
Using links to your website and sales pages within your articles, you can direct people who are interested in what you have to offer to your product offer where you can get their contact details or ask them to contact you. You can also use your articles to motivate people to ask you questions about your product/service and spark off conversations which if handled with tact, can lead to sales.
By looking for other website and blogs that cater for people within your target market, you can network with other writers and share high quality traffic by posting on each other's blogs and referring visitors to each other's websites. This way you are making use of huge fan-bases created over many years among your target market. This can be achieved by looking for potential partners and reaching out to them. Ask good questions and be generous without asking for anything in return. You can offer to be of service to them first and many times you can rest assured that reciprocation will happen.
You can also post your articles on a large number of very popular free websites (such as triberr.com and tumblr.com among so many other) that you can find online and which are frequented daily by thousands of people who are looking for content on a wide variety of topics and interests.
One last thing to keep in mind about the topic of creating articles and posting them across the web is that these techniques are typically very good for improving your search engine rankings which will get you even more traffic to your website and blog.
2. YouTube
YouTube is another great channel. With millions of people visiting it daily, you can attract a lot of attention with simple videos which you can do in under an hour. Do not worry too much about the quality of the video as long as it is clear enough for people to understand. Choose good, search-engine-friendly titles for your videos to improve their find-ability and put a link to your lead capture page in your videos and in the description so that people go from your video to your sales pages.
If you have enough content to offer about your product or service, you can post regularly. You do not need to have very long videos (about 3 minutes is usually enough). Tap into people’s emotions with videos that are funny, moving or inspirational, clever and unique if possible.
Videos create an intimate connection with people that discover you since they can hear your voice and see your face and this helps you get email subscribers with whom you can maintain a long-term contact.
YouTube videos are also very effective for ranking well on search engines due to its powerful domain!
3. Affiliate Marketing
For those who are not familiar with the concept of affiliate marketing, this is where you get other people to do your online marketing, lead generation and sales for you for a commission on results. This is obviously an amazing way to get business without doing the work or risking any money yourself.
Affiliate programs can be set up to bring you sales leads or actual sales, depending on how you prefer to work and you will pay a commission to your affiliates depending on the price of your product, whether they are getting a complete sale or just a lead and your opinion of what a good commission is. The number of affiliates who actually rake up your offer will naturally be affected primarily by your commission rate so it is important to be fair here. If you can create a win-win situation between your business and your affiliates you can easily put your business on fast-track.
There are many existing platforms that allow you to connect with an existing affiliate base by listing your product (such as clickbank.com for example). You can also create your own affiliate tracking if you want to have full control over it but this will obviously cost you more.
4. Slideshare
Slideshare is a slide-hosting service owned by LinkedIn which gets an incredible amount of traffic daily. It is currently ranked #164 of all sites in the world on Alexa meaning that it is almost as high BBC.com. The amount of content published on it daily and their huge traffic numbers ensures that you’ll get a lot of views on Slideshare in relatively little time - for free!
All you need to do is create a slide presentation about an article that you have already written, put a few sentences on each slide together with some interesting and catchy images and include a call to action at the end that links to your website or lead capture page where people can subscribe. Make sure you do focus on content that is value-able, funny, interesting, inspiring or emotionally-provocative.
Slideshare also offers you the advantage of ranking well on search engines for certain keywords that are included in your presentation due to its authoritative domain.
5. Giveaways
Giving away something for free is an incredibly effective way of getting a huge number of interested potential clients in very little time - if done correctly! It is important to do this in a tasteful manner in order to avoid putting your brand in a bad light and since paid advertising is the fastest way to get people into your competition, some skill in paid advertising is necessary.
Here is how it goes...
- Select a product or gift that interest your target audience and put it up for competition
- Create a page which displays the items to be won and some basic details about the competition
- Include a lead-capture form which extracts basic details about the person (used for segmentation): Name and surname, Emails address, Gender and Locality
- Send traffic into the landing page via Facebook adverts (a small budget should be enough) - using Facebook to generate traffic will also result in building your following on Facebook
- Define a minimum amount of people that have to join for the competition to be valid. It is important to give people the chance to opt-out of receiving marketing mail (they rarely do this)
This technique will drastically build your mailing list, boost your social media following and attract people to your website.
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How can your business make use of these techniques to drive sales from new marketing? Have you got valuable content to offer your target audience?
Let us know more about your business or get in touch with us for a free consultation on how you can start making use of the techniques.
