International Business and Technology Blog

If you are a business owner, sales and marketing manager or IT manager, the chances are you have become very familiar with your website. Whether or not you find your website clearly structured and understandable, the ultimate judges will always be its end users – your customers, prospects, partners, and employees. A website that is considered friendly by its users is considerably more likely to fulfill its marketing/sales potential and bring in new business. 

We bring you 5 trends that have become crucial for any company that wishes to succeed in Europe and stay ahead of their competition. Don't lag behind!  Read our tips on: design - responsive, flat with subtle animation, user-friendly and online marketing - videos and multilingual marketing on social media.

Want to grow your export and business in Europe? John Worthington, Managing Director of ibt partners presents at the Massachusetts Export Expo on how to develop effective European sales and marketing strategies using the internet.

An active presence on social media is not just a marketing fad, it’s a crucial part of any business’ marketing strategy - the new way how to build your brand and engage with your customers or other target audiences. Many US companies understand the importance of social media as well as importance of country specific websites for each of their key markets. But they are still often unsure about how to manage social media across a number of multilingual markets. Which social media networks are important for my business? Do I need to create a new business profile in each country?  If you’re asking these questions – don’t worry! You’re not the only one and we have answers to that.

More frequently than ever, end customers as well as businesses start their product searches and procurement processes online. Search engines have become today’s marketplace, where customer demand meets supply. If you want to stand out amongst your competitors, you need to be visible online. You need to optimize your website for search engines.  

Google is the #1 search engine in the USA with a 67% share, and it dominates the European market. It boasts a 97% share in Poland, 96% share in Spain, 95% share in France and Italy, 93% share in Germany, and 89% share in the UK. See table at the bottom of the blog for more countries.

In our previous blog we introduced two different types of videos that can boost your business: demonstration and explainer videos. Today we will have a closer look at how to get return on investment in these videos by making them visible to a broader audience.

Maybe you’ve heard of website localization already, maybe this is the first time. But don’t worry, in this blog we’ll explain what it is and why it matters to your exports!

If you want to grow your European exports and business, firstly you need to ensure people will be able to find your business on the internet. Secondly, once you’ve got your visitors on the website, you need to present them with both text and visual elements that are native to their home country. That will help you generate local demand for your products or services in Europe. Website localization is the process that will help you achieve that. So what is it exactly?

Both the EU and the USA are very online-oriented economies, with 375 million European and 254 million American internet users, and an ecommerce spend of $379Bn and $225.5Bn respectively (2012). If you’re selling your products via distributors and think that you can avoid being involved in the online world then you are mistaken; you’re making your brand less competitive and missing out on business. Moreover, these trends are not going to slow down; expected 2014-2015 ecommerce growth rates are at 18% for the EU and 13% for the USA. Learn why and how you should use online presence and marketing to support your distributors!

Petoskey Plastics has been the innovator in manufacturing high-performance blown plastic film and bags, supplying automotive, recycling, retail, packaging and construction industries. Slip-N-Grip is a US based division dedicated to the automotive aftermarket industry, designing and manufacturing seat covers that have been frequently used by many European OEMs, such as Jaguar, Volvo, Saab, Nissan and Chrysler over the last 15 years.

You might enjoy watching videos online, but have you considered creating one for your own business?

According to Forbes, 59% of senior executives prefer watching a video to reading a text. 65% of these executives then click through to visit the seller’s website, and nearly half report to have contacted the seller after watching the video. Videobrewery has similar findings – about half of people who viewed an online marketing video made a purchase afterwards.