Clients often ask us “What is a typical return on investment in country specific websites?” While the benefits of international online presence and online marketing are enormous, there is nothing like a “typical” return on investment. It all depends on how you define the return and what investment you make.
Return can be calculated in different ways and this will be unique to your business. Country specific websites and their online marketing contribute towards your sales both directly and indirectly via brand development. Both of these need to be taken into account when calculating your return. In addition to directly attributed sales, typical ways of measuring the return are by putting a monetary value on: website visitors, online sales enquiries, contact enquires, social media engagement, social media followers, and subscribers.
Investment is twofold: one-off investment in building the websites and on-going investment in marketing the websites. In both cases, investment includes resources (human resources when you have the capability in-house or financial resources when you outsource), software cost and optional, yet very helpful advertising fees for social media campaigns. Examples of activities for which resources are needed include: content preparation, localization, translation and optimization; wireframe and design creation; site build; content upload; testing; keyword research; online marketing strategy (search engine optimization (SEO), social media…); creation of social media campaigns; SEO monitoring and updates etc.
Today we will focus on getting return via generation of new leads.
How to generate new leads
- Create useful resources in target languages for your prospective clients, e.g. brochures, product catalogs, manuals and guides.
- Create visually engaging “calls to action” (CTAs) in forms of buttons to promote the above mentioned resources. For example “Download brochure”.
- Create "Get more information” or “Get a quote” CTAs on individual product pages.
- Create forms to gather contact details with automatic follow-up actions (e.g. brochure download, quote mailing). Keep the forms short, so you do not discourage people from filling in the form and downloading your resources. Recommended form fields include First name, Last name, E-mail, Company (if you’re selling B2B).
- Add a form to your contact page. This form can have more fields than forms to download resources. For example, telephone number, country, product selection and a message. We recommend combining obligatory and optional fields. This will depend on your specific case.
- Optimize content on pages with resources, so that they are ranked high on search engines and can bring in new visitors that you can convert into leads via forms linked to these resources.
- Run online marketing campaigns to promote your resources on local social media networks.
- Build up the number of followers on your social media accounts by creating value-adding posts using targeting by country/language (read our blog on managing multilingual campaigns on social media).
How to measure the results
- Monitor number of forms filled in.
- Monitor number of leads.
- Monitor number of qualified leads. First you need to define a qualified lead – this can be done on a case by case basis when you have smaller volumes of leads at the beginning. For larger volumes we recommend to implement a lead-scoring system.
- Monitor and compare conversion rates of your landing pages.
- Monitor and compare conversion rates of your online marketing campaigns.
- Monitor the number and growth of social media followers.
Download our ebook to learn more about other goals our clients consider when calculating return on investment in country specific websites and online marketing, including:
- Unify and promote your brand
- Rank at the top of local search results
- Access more markets, more customers
- Target and communicate on social media
- Generate new leads (covered in this blog)
- Qualify your leads and convert to sales
- Identify agents, distributors and partners
- Sell online through ecommerce
Note: Remember to remain respectful of European policies for data gathering and managing. Safe Harbor frameworks provide US companies with a way to meet the adequacy standard. US organizations wishing to receive personal information from EU organizations legally must join the Safe Harbor program. Comply with one or both of the Safe Harbor Frameworks. Reaffirm your self-certification annually to the Department of Commerce, indicating that your organization continues to adhere to the Safe Harbor program requirements. Publish in your privacy policy statement that your organization adheres to the Safe Harbor Privacy Principles. Read more on Safe Harbor and other European policies in our ebook Guidelines to tariffs, regulations and data privacy in Europe.