International Business and Technology Blog

Over 30,000 trade shows each year are managed by thousands of organisers (who employ tens of thousands of people), mobilise millions of exhibitors, entice hundreds of millions of visitors and generate >US$26Bn in revenues.

From a fringe techy activity, social media at trade fairs has exploded and today is an obligation if you wish to achieve successful trade show metrics.

We are continuously looking to see how effective our online marketing is, and one of the great benefits of digital marketing is that there are some excellent tools to tell you just that. We are running a series of webinars which are very popular, with over 50 people registered for the last one. Now, my challenge is to set about doubling that number. We share some of our own online marketing activities to help you improve your marketing return on investment.

Last week I spent four days attending the Paris Air Show, supporting Business Oregon and their three companies exhibiting, as well as Northeast Pennsylvania and their five companies attending the show. If you have not been, it is an enormous seven day event. This year there were 2,260 exhibitions from 47 countries. The USA had 320 exhibitors, 230-plus in the US International Pavilion where I was based. Around the show itself there were many side events, receptions and evening networking parties.

Watch out “Les Gafa” are about! So says the EU Commission. The French provided this useful acronym, which encompasses a lot more than those four leviathan companies, Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon. It is all about entrenched EU industries protecting their turf, tax revenues (who is collecting and who is not) and all this wrapped into privacy concerns, when helpful! It was a big month for Margrethe Vestager, the European Commissioner for Competition, as she unveiled long awaited accusations against Google.

If you want to be visible in your target export market online, you need to optimize your website for local search engines, such as google.de in Germany or google.fr in France. You might laugh that we call this global search engine giant local, but that is indeed the truth. Over 90% of searches in most European countries come from local Googles that show different search results. Remember, you cannot simply translate a well performing US keyword to Spanish or Dutch and expect to see the same results. Search trends, including keywords popularity and difficulty to rank, vary among markets.

Susanna Hardy, our web-savvy Managing Director – EU, had a great month “webinaring”. Susanna prepared, presented (audio and visual) and fielded the follow-ups from two webinars. She worked closely with our clients the Maine International Trade Center (MITC), Maine’s leading source for international business assistance as well as the Food Export Association of the Midwest USA and Food Export USA Northeast, who both did a great job hosting and moderating. Our sincere thanks go to Wade Merritt (Vice President) and Hannah Webb (Trade Assistance Manager) from the MITC team and John Belmont (Communications Manager), Joe Yotti (Branded Program Manager) and Kathryn Navarro (International Marketing Program Assistant) from the Food Export Association of the Midwest USA and Food Export USA Northeast team. The webinars were well attended and a great success. Attendees were selected and invited on the basis of their interest in growing their exports and the webinars proved educational and informative. Lots of time was dedicated to interactive questions as participants asked a range of export, ecommerce related questions and receiving informed answers. For MITC the subject was: “Grow your exports and business in Europe: Using online and ecommerce opportunities", presented on Wednesday the 18^th of March and the next week on Tuesday the 24^th March with the Food Export Association of the Midwest USA and Food Export USA Northeast, were pleased to present the webinar: "Building Your Online Presence to Boost Exports: Europe as a Case Study".  

I read an interesting article by Jayson DeMers in the Forbes that shared a report from Shareaholic. Based on the 340k websites in the Shareaholic network then, as of December 2014, social media is now the #1 driver of all website referral accounting for 31.24% compared to the 22.71% from the same period in the previous year.

It was predicted that 2014 would have been a milestone, when the number of Google searches carried out on mobile devices would surpass that of PCs. Although Google remains secretive about the exact proportion of mobile versus desktop search, it is estimated that half of searches do indeed come from smartphones and tablets.

Trade fairs are a wonderful export and international business development tool. When well-managed (from selection, to planning, through preparation, attendance and crucially follow-up) they can be hugely influential, highly cost-effective and a big generator of new, as well as extending existing, business. They can also bring unique opportunities to visit faraway places, meet friends, colleagues, competitors and start a whole new social life and fall in love. A few years ago, a French member of our business development team attended a hospitality trade fair in Paris. Being a vigilant young man, he spotted an intelligent, beautiful young Italian lady. Suffice it to say, I recall that the end of the 4 day event, during which time we saw very little of either of them, was a very sad occasion. As life’s rich pattern flows, so did they. Within 6 months, we had a team member based in Italy as he relocated to Milan. They are now happily married, with two children!