Current Trends in International Marketing

– By Tony Leong, DoMs HOD

Marketing isn’t exactly what it used to be. More and more businesses are doing business in countries around the world today, and that means more and more obstacles for skilled marketers. If you’re planning to extend your business to the global marketplace, it’s important to keep up-to-date with current trends in international marketing so that you can choose which one will be most successful for your company. Here are some of these guides and some basic information about each of them.

Social Media

One of the most powerful methods for today’s skilled marketers can be summed up in two words: social media. No longer just a tool for sharing family photos and cute pet videos, social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and more are now an undeniably common way to market and promote your products and services around the world. The strength of social media as a marketing tool is shown by the major league corporations that are now using it with amazing results: businesses like Nike, Starbucks, Pampers, NASA, Denny’s and many others can testify to the fact that social media is still a powerful platform for goods and services across the globe.

Video Advertising

Live video streaming is an increasingly common feature of social media. Using live video streaming for international marketing and promotional campaigns is successful in allowing consumers and potential buyers to experience a “real-time” occurrence no matter where they are on the globe. Several businesses have found live streaming to be an effective way to perform questioning and answering sessions with audiences. This kind of active involvement creates a connection between the company and its buyers, strengthens the loyalty of the participants to the brand and allows viewers to provide live testimonials about the product or service.

Artificial Intelligence (AI)

International businesses are currently leveraging the power of AI to help monitor and evaluate customer shopping behaviour in countries around the world. This type of information was, until recently, an incredibly time-consuming and daunting collection of data, usually reserved for the biggest, most profitable organisations with the manpower needed to compile and evaluate the findings. But thanks to AI, this sort of knowledge will soon be beyond the scope of marketers working for practically any size organisation.

Cross-Sector Marketing

Simply put, cross-sector marketing refers to the practice of using the influence of other brands to boost the prestige and success of your own brands. The fast-food industry is a good example of cross-sector marketing at its most simple level. Studies have shown that fast-food restaurants clustered within a short distance of each other record substantially higher sales than those in more remote locations. This may sound counter-intuitive, but the truth is that a number of different fast-food restaurants located within the same few blocks offer customers a wide range of options and increase the probability that shoppers will stop eating. Skilled marketers are forecasting that cross-sector foreign marketing would become more popular in the coming year, including a rise in strategic alliances to achieve a higher level of performance for all stakeholders.

Marketing is definitely not what it used to be. The truth is that our digital era offers marketing professionals more opportunities than ever before. While all these patterns are important to bear in mind, note that the most important aspect of any international marketing strategy is something even more fundamental: you must be able to interact successfully with buyers and customers in other countries. And that means hiring the services of an accomplished, skilled translator. The first phase in your international marketing activities can be made today by contacting a renowned translation company and finding the interpreter that best fits your company’s needs.

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