Borderfree : 5 Digital Marketing Tactics to Accelerate your Global Launch

5 Digital Marketing Tactics to Accelerate your Global Launch

You're going global! You might already have great brand awareness on your home turf. Now it's time to amplify it internationally so you can sell to new customers around the world. One of the best ways to raise your brand profile in the early stages is through digital marketing.

Your goal with digital marketing is to build positive brand awareness and engage with your target audience in a meaningful way-not necessarily drive profits. The good news is that through digital marketing you'll glean critical information about consumers' shopping behaviors that will help you make better decisions later towards achieving your profit goals later on.

We partnered with Net Media Planet to give you five tried-and-proven Digital Marketing approaches to helping you build your online brand awareness:

1. Comparison-shopping engines. Use a product datafeed to list your product range on multiple comparison-shopping engines such as Google Shopping, Amazon Marketplace, Shopzilla, Kelkoo and PriceGrabber to increase the opportunities for potential customers to see your products during their product research phase.

2. Paid Search Advertising. Use Paid Search on Google, Bing and Yahoo! to reach potential consumers who are searching for your brand and your product range during their research phase, such as Google Adwords and the Yahoo Bing Network across the US and Europe; Yandex in Russia; and, Baidu in China. Google's Keyword Planner will help you research additional keywords for given territories, while Google's Global Market Finder will help you identify the countries with the highest opportunity for your brand and product range.

3. Online display advertising. Platforms such as Google's DoubleClick Bid Manager and Yahoo! Ad Manager Plus allow you to reach a target audience that isn't aware of your brand with specific, image-based creative ad campaigns. The Google Display Network (GDN) is another platform that offers placement and contextual targeting capabilities to further extend your reach.

4. Email and social platforms. Dedicated emails are ideal for promotions and discounts, which can be customised for individual brands and countries. You'll want to get the timing, location, language and details of the promotion right, and this often comes down to understanding your target audiences and the commonalities they share, which are not always grouped by country. Facebook and Twitter also are good ways to reach potential new customers in foreign countries. Consider making your social media "shoppable" on Facebook and Instagram.

5. Retargeting campaigns.  This is one of the most effective ways finding new shoppers or turning purchasers into repeat buyers. You can set up a personalised campaign to target users who have viewed a product and left or abandoned items in their shopping cart. For Display campaigns, invest in dynamic creatives to offer personalised messaging to consumers. The message of the advert changes according to the actions the user has performed on your website.

And retailers-don't forget the power of search engine optimization. Organic SEO is an important part of marketing your products, too, as it lets you have a conversation with your customers. Set up a blog, Twitter and Instagram account and publish regularly to drive organic search and traffic to your site.

The path to cross-border ecommerce stardom isn't easy, but digital marketing is the first step to connecting to international customers and getting them to interact with your brand. Make those first experiences fruitful so they keep coming back for more.