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.

Every year, the 28 countries of the European Union (EU) suck in 100’s of billions of dollars worth of goods and services from the USA. In 2014, that figure is expected to exceed $0.5 Tn. The EU and the USA remain each other’s largest import/export partners (>$1 Tn annual flow). In this article we are going to drill down into the import of goods (so excluding services, which will be dealt with next month) by the EU from the USA. Firstly, we will ask what are these goods that are so consistently imported (making the EU the #1 market, after Canada, for US exported goods) and secondly which EU countries are doing all that heavy importing…

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.

Living in the USA, browsing with Google.com, your search results are invariably in English. If you search for a product then Google tells you where to find it locally. The internet is mostly in English, right?

Hot off the press, yes it is official. Eurozone (18 countries) GDP grew by a whole 0.2% in Q3.2014, exceeding expectations by a whopping 0.1% (real optimism there). As you can imagine with that kind of good news we in Europe are all off on a well-earned buying spree, celebrating and adding to our Q4.2014 numbers.

On October the 3^rd, the 7th week-long round of TTIP negotiations closed with the wonderfully named EU Chief TTIP Negotiator, Ignacio Garcia Bercero, stating somewhat blandly (Can we expect more? Yes we can): “We have again had a week of productive discussions. Negotiations are now moving smoothly into the textual phase, where discussions are based on specific textual proposals”.

We all know Bruce Springsteen’s view on getting paid. Clearly, the European Payments Council (EPC), the decision-making and coordination body of the European banking industry in relation to payments, charged with developing the Single Euro Payments Area (SEPA), had the Boss in mind, when scoping out this innovative program.

It is widely agreed that the use of technology and business growth are closely linked, and more so when companies look to develop export markets. A report from New Zealand’s Business Operations Survey concluded that export rates are significantly higher for those companies with online ordering systems to collect sales. This does not relate only to large companies. Small, medium, large – businesses of all sizes that use online technologies have higher rates of exporting than those that do not.