How to Use Digital Marketing for Export Promotion

In the past, export promotion required substantial financial investments and an army of local business experts and consultants to do all the fieldwork in a specific target market. However, with digital marketing, everything has become much easier. Businesses can effectively promote their exports without leaving comfortable offices (for many, this means a home office).

Curious to know how? Today, we’ll explore some of the most effective strategies in digital marketing for export promotion. The whole world can be your marketplace — we can help you make it happen.

Building a Strong International Brand Presence

To successfully promote your products and services internationally or in a specific country, you must build an international brand presence.

In marketing, this is called brand positioning. The competition is intense in any market, especially globally, and you need to find words, messages, and visuals to make your brand stand out from the hundreds and thousands of your competitors.

Below, we provide several proven strategies to help you position a brand for international visibility.

Define a Clear and Consistent Brand Identity

All communication with your target audience must use the same philosophy and ideology (mission, vision, values, and how they are embedded in your product). Consistent communication will help your brand stand in the face of adversity and show resilience when market tides get rough.

Build Trust With Localised Social Proof

Encourage local opinion leaders, influencers, and ordinary people (customers) to vouch for your brand, i.e., make user-generated content (UGC), such as reviews, comments, product unpacking videos, brand-related podcasts, etc. For that, follow up with the satisfied customers and encourage them to leave positive feedback for additional discounts.

Be Culturally Aware and Respectful

To earn more trust and appeal to the local audiences more effectively, learn about the traditions and respect the cultures of the export markets where you expand your business.

For example, in Japan, people value modesty, so direct, bold advertising may seem aggressive, while in Norway, consumers prioritise eco-conscious brands, so emphasising adherence to high ecological standards and the presence of recycled materials in your brand will be a winning tactic.

Invest in International PR and Thought Leadership

In the markets you enter, be active with the opinion leaders and participate in niche-specific events like fairs, exhibitions, and tournaments. Staying where the customers are is a winning tactic, even if all locations are virtual and happen online.

? Pro tip: Gear up for seasonal demand peaks in regions where you build your brand presence. For instance, you can run a brand stand at local festivals or organise an online giveaway campaign during national holidays.

SEO Strategies for International Visibility

Search engine optimisation (SEO) is about building visibility in search engines and driving traffic. That is precisely what you aim to achieve in export promotion.

As one of the most affordable export marketing strategies, SEO offers a vast arsenal of effective techniques used via diverse channels to position your brand for expansion into foreign markets.

Leveraging Local SEO Strategies for Regional Promotion

To enhance your business’s geographic influence, focus on several local SEO strategies:

• Optimising your Google Business Profile;
• Boost foot traffic (utilising “open now near me” searches);
• Running region-specific PR campaigns;
• Creating location-based content for landing pages;
• Engaging with local influencers;
• Using local schema markup.

With local SEO, you can quickly and efficiently achieve your primary promotion goals of building visibility, brand recognition, and driving local traffic. This can be done by organising effective brand reputation monitoring and management, and optimising for mobile users while considering the specifics of local mobile operators.

? Pro Tip: Add images with geotags and alt text optimised for local search terms. This helps search engines “understand” your visuals and rank your content higher for location-specific keywords.

Conducting International Keyword Research

Keywords are the workhorse of SEO. At least, that’s how it has been historically. For promoting exports to foreign countries, your content must match what people in those markets search for. In other words, you must find and utilise the right keywords and use them in your promotional content.

Here’s how to conduct international keyword research effectively:

• Understand the local language and dialects — don’t just rely on Google Translate and AI to help you with translating your promotional materials into local languages. Hire a native translator to help you out.
• Analyse local competitors — instead of doing international keyword research from scratch, start with competitor analysis. Look at which keywords your direct competitors use and copy their best practices.
• Focus on local search intent — aim to understand user intent in each foreign market. This will give your SEO specialists a competitive edge and a choice of the optimal keywords and keyword combinations.
• Consider regional search engines — your goal is to find the right keywords for local search engines, as Google may not be the number one search engine in your target market.

? Pro Tip: Optimise your site’s meta titles and descriptions with region-specific keywords.

Building Geo-Relevant Backlinks

To compete effectively overseas, consider adopting a broader approach to link-building that supports geo-relevant backlinks. This means leveraging not only global sources but also regional high-authority ones, such as local directories, news outlets, and industry-specific platforms.

Consider these additional tactics for building geo-relevant backlinks:

• Conduct outreach to contribute guest posts to regional publications;
• Build relationships with local influencers and opinion leaders;
• Earn backlinks by translating your existing publications into local languages;
• Create link magnets (useful tools like calculators and templates);
• Approach website owners with suggestions for fixing broken links.

Geo-relevant backlinks on your export-oriented web pages will drive local traffic, and will send to the regional search engines more trust signals with improved visibility in country-specific search results.

? Pro Tip: Prioritise Country-Code Top-Level Domains (ccTLDs) for enhanced search rankings, e.g., ca. in Canada, fr. in France, au, in Australia, and so on.

Content Marketing to Nurture Foreign Audiences

Many mistakenly believe content marketing is about selling products and services directly or through ads. Such a point of view blurs content marketing’s value and makes it insignificant compared to paid ads and direct sales.

The purpose of content marketing, in general, and in export promotion in particular, is to engage, educate, and retain customers. This is what professional marketers call nurturing a lead, which may or may not become a customer.

Here are several content marketing strategies that work well in the digital export marketing contexts:

• Create educational videos with multilingual subtitles — videos work much better for promotion than textual information, e.g., viewers retain 95% of a message when they watch it in a video, compared to 10% when reading it in text.
• Prioritise quality content with in-depth discussions and original research — there is simply too much superficial, AI-generated content everywhere, so readers seek and trust original and thorough materials.
• Offer downloadable resources — downloading has been the cornerstone of retention since the early Internet days. You can nurture international users more efficiently by making downloadable reports, guides, and whitepapers.
• Use social media for global reach — all social media platforms combined service around 6 billion people globally, making social media an excellent stepping stone for engaging, educating, and retaining customers in any part of the world.

? Pro Tip: Use data-driven storytelling, as, with this approach, you can kill two birds with one stone, i.e., throwing data to hit customers’ minds and stories to target their hearts (emotions).

The Key Takeaways

Digital marketing offers a vast arsenal of tools and strategies to promote your products and services internationally.

One effective export marketing strategy is local SEO to build visibility and trust among local target audiences. Ensure your Google Business Profile is up-to-date and contains complete information about your brand and products. Also, collaborate with local niche-relevant influencers and thought leaders to capitalise on their existing audiences.

Content marketing holds immense potential to amplify your promotion efforts by engaging and educating customers on your products and services. Among the most effective tactics are downloadable resources, quality content, and emphasis on video promo materials.

With such importance placed on the success of ports & shipping within a business, at the Institute of Supply Chain Management (IoSCM), we offer a range of professional qualifications, carefully designed to match modern business’ needs and upskill professionals at all stages of their careers.