6 major processes of foreign trade marketing promotion

1. Develop a promotion strategy

Before doing foreign trade promotion , we need to develop a marketing strategy, define who our target customers are, what marketing methods are available, whether ROI can be calculated, etc. You can ask yourself the following questions.

（1）Who are the users who actually pay for your products and services?
（2）What is your goal? How much traffic per day or how many inquiries per day?
（3）What methods do you use to attract your users?
(4) How do your customers generally find the services and products you provide?
（5）How much manpower and funds do you plan to invest in the marketing plan?
(6) Answer the above questions honestly on paper, and continue reading.

2. Build a good foreign trade website

There are many foreign trade websites, but 99% of the foreign trade website construction companies are unqualified. The foreign trade website can be said to be an important cornerstone of these steps. All promotion and marketing methods will revolve around a truly qualified English foreign trade website. If the foreign trade company gets stuck at this step, then the subsequent work will naturally not be able to proceed. Here are some website building strategies.

(1) Define the website's goals and develop the entire website around these goals.
(2) Remove the Chinese style and make the font, design, color and layout more in line with the aesthetic tastes of overseas users.
(3) Excellent copywriting. Truly good copywriting is one that can motivate users to achieve your goals. The minimum requirement is that it should be free of grammatical errors.
(4) Perfect user experience.
(5) The website can have a certain conversion rate. If there are no inquiries from every 500 IP addresses, there is something wrong with your website.
（6）Comply with search engine optimization standards.

3. Obtain effective traffic

Now that we have a strategy and a website, the next step is to attract traffic. With sufficient effective traffic, we will be able to generate inquiries, orders, and ultimately cash flow. There are many ways to obtain traffic, and we mainly look at the four main methods suitable for the foreign trade industry.

(1) SEO traffic is mainly divided into four steps: setting primary and secondary keywords, optimizing corresponding web pages according to keywords, regularly adding web page content, and adding relevant external links.

(2) PPC traffic PPC traffic mainly refers to paid traffic, which refers to the promotional traffic from promotional tools such as Bing Export. The traffic and keywords that a website's own SEO can bring are limited. Using PPC to expand more keywords and traffic is a good supplement to SEO.

(3) Corporate blog traffic: The content of a foreign trade website itself is limited, and the things that can be introduced are also limited. Corporate blogs can increase the content of the website, create more keywords and include pages. According to statistics, the traffic of foreign trade websites with corporate blogs is much greater than that of websites without corporate blogs. For a well-operated corporate blog, it can generate more than 4 times the inquiries. Corporate blogs are also the easiest link to start.

(4) Social network traffic is an indispensable channel for the promotion of English websites. Link your corporate blog with social networking sites, accumulate fans and circles on social networking sites, answer users' questions on social networking sites, and publish some short information through social networking sites. For foreign trade B2B and B2C websites, some basic operations of SNS sites have been introduced before. In addition to the recommended reading below, social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and Quora can also bring traffic.

4. Improve inquiry conversion rate

Now that we have website traffic, the next question is how to turn that traffic into inquiries. For general foreign trade websites, it is unrealistic to have thousands or tens of thousands of traffic every day, so it is very important to convert the limited traffic into customer inquiries to the greatest extent. First of all, you need to segment your traffic users. After all, each user who comes to your website has different needs, so segmentation and corresponding marketing are the key. The users of your website can be roughly divided into

(1) Users who are unaware that they have needs.
(2) Aware of the need but no plans to address it.
(3) Be aware of the need and plan to address it.

(4) Be aware of your needs and compare suppliers.

So, can your foreign trade website distinguish these users? Does it have corresponding landing pages for users with different needs? Does it have a clear call to action? Does it collect user information? At least the vast majority of websites I've seen don't have the functionality to generate high conversion rates, and are more like a display window without a salesperson.

5. Convert enquiries into sales

The three steps to a transaction on the Internet are nothing more than "traffic - inquiry - sales". Each link is very important, but for most foreign trade B2Bs, the time from inquiry to sales will be much longer than that of B2C. After all, B2B orders are quoted by container, so customer relationship maintenance, sales skills and professional level are all elements of success. From the perspective of Internet marketing, you at least need to do it.

(1) Are there different sales pitches and marketing strategies for customers at different stages?
(2) Whether there is permission-based email marketing to maintain customer relationships.
(3) For companies with CRM, whether customer information is complete and segmented.
(4) Whether the Leads form on the website is segmented to provide options for customers. For example, differentiation by country and differentiation by product demand.

6. Data Analysis

Data analysis is a very interesting job, but not everyone likes dealing with data. If you are a type C person or have people with such personality in your team, then it should be easy to let them complete this job. The data you need to know include Traffic to lead, Leads to Client, Cost Per Lead, Cost Per Client. When you know these data clearly, you will know your marketing direction.

At the same time, corresponding data measurement standards can be listed for each of the above five steps. For example, if you place paid ads on Bing search, you can independently check reports on product display, click-through rate, customer distribution, etc. through the background to understand the cost expenditure. In this way, we can clearly know where the marketing focus should be and what to do next.

Overseas promotion is a proposition that has no standard answer. It has many answers. Of course, you can also find another way and perhaps you can find a different path to success. But no matter which method you use, it is most basic to complete the above six processes.

Author: Foreign Trade SOHO Circle

Source: Foreign Trade SOHO Circle