Archive for February, 2010

Small Business Action Plan for First Time International Business Development

Tuesday, February 23rd, 2010

Adapting your business to a foreign country’s culture, is not an easy process the first time you try. You will not be able to anticipate the stumbling blocks that would not happen ‘back hone’. More importantly you will not know what you need to do to adapt yourself to the new challenges and tasks at hand. You will need to develop a Small Business Action Plan for your first effort with International Business Development.

Are you a small business and want to develop your international business?
Do you have a limited budget to develop your international sales?
Do you already have domestic clients but are just starting to reach out to international clients?

There are numerous strategies that exist to get you more international clients. A lot depends on your business and your commitment.
Here is an action plan to start your first international business development strategy:

1. Internationalize your website

It is important to make sure your website is not pushing your international visitors away from you. Bad or non-existent cross cultural communication can easily do this.

You can create a website specifically targeting an international audience, in your language. This is a business decision and will depend on the nature of your business and your clients. Companies in non-English speaking countries will often create an English language website specifically to target their international markets.

You may decide to keep your main website targeted to your domestic clients. There are still ways to tweak your website, with very small touches, to give a better experience for your international readers. Have a translation tool on your website. The online translation tools are far from perfect but they do bring your clients that one extra step closer.

2. Research your international markets

International business development is all about you learning to adapt. Adapt your business, your products, your communication, and your sales pitches, to each country you market to.

How do you start if you do not have any contact with your foreign markets? Use everything you have available to you and slowly build up your foreign market research. The beginning usually requires the most effort. It does not take as long as you expect.

If you are just starting out check out all of the associations, official groups for all international data you can find. Use the phone extensively. Do some online research. The goal is to simply become familiar, and feel comfortable, with your market. This is the time to eliminate all culturally inappropriate businesses.
The research that you do at the same time as you are marketing to your audience gives you the best results, but don’t get stuck spending too much time here.

3. Track visitors and results; adjust your communication

This step is very important. The better your analysis is, the stronger your international business potential will be.

Tracking and testing are key marketing tools. Your international communication is a process of testing, adjusting, inciting feedback and learning more about your audience. You have to be sure that you establish measurable goals before you begin testing. You must have a tracking system in place for your goals. And you must also track the responses your communication is having on your international readers. Remember, you can’t manage what you can’t measure.

International business development is all about your capacity to adjust your business to the needs of people in another country. In order to make these adjustments and improvement you must know where you start and how to interpret results. You need precise things to measure.

4. Create a newsletter in English targeted for your international clients and distribute by email and on your website.

Internet marketing today is all about creating an online presence through content. Internet readers actively search for content. Your international readers are the same. One major benefit of publishing a newsletter is it provides a platform for consistency.

A newsletter helps you to stimulate market feedback, with links back to your website and other content provided through different media. Links to audio and video files, quizzes, surveys, free reports and other feedback generating tools published or advertised in your newsletter create reader interaction.

A regular newsletter targeted to a broad international audience will not be as powerful as content marketing targeted to one specific culture. But it is an easy and inexpensive way to start if you have no real idea where you want to market to.

5. Include tools to stimulate feedback

There are tools you can use to stimulate feedback. Quizzes, surveys, polls, questions, homework assignments, and contests are some tools you can use to stimulate feedback.

The key is to find out what your target readers want and need the most. As you learn more about your international prospects you will adjust your feedback tools and enticements.

You can grab hold of your readers by offering free or discounting items that are not information products, discounts available only to your readers. You will have a better response rate if you can identify what your readers really want.

You can encourage readers to participate with you feedback generating tools by offering them free white papers, case studies, reports, guides and other information useful to your readers. If your feedback enticements are information products, you have another platform to use in your internet marketing strategy.

A wise use of different media touches linked to your feedback stimulation tools strengthens your internet marketing. These tools will take some planning and strategy to put in place.

6. Track results and adjust your communication

This is a repetition of step 3. Tracking your results and analyzing your international responses is an ongoing process. International marketing is all about taking things one step and a time and making adjustments along the way.

The two processes of internet marketing and international marketing can be combined right here in the tracking and adjustment. This is also how you can learn about your foreign markets even if you live thousands of miles away and you don’t speak the language. This combination can be powerful at very first phase of your international business development.

Internet marketing is all about adjusting your message real time. It is about being present online in real time. If your communication is outdated no one will listen to you. You need to adapt to your foreign markets. When you start out, you do not know much about them. You must continually check and adjust your communication.

7. Identify a country to target specifically

You will get better results from your international communication if it is targeted to very specific markets.

This means you need to identify a country as a target to market specifically to; and there is no real way to choose which country you should start with other than saying the country with the best potential for real sales. There is no magical formula for choosing the first international target market that works across all industries. Find a country where you can reasonably expect a good client base.

There are obvious cultural obstacles for certain types of businesses. So check with all of the appropriate domestic authorities. They will have good insights into what goes on in other countries. Check with your countries embassy in the country concerned.

You can also base your decision solely on data: export data, industry revenue. You can also base your decision on where your competition is located or not located or if they are considering entering into a market.

International business is all about changing your mindset. Choose a country and get started. The first learning curve is the hardest. So don’t be afraid, jump in and focus on the learning experience of getting to know your market in one foreign country.

8. Create either a blog or a country specific newsletter for that target country depending on your foreign market.

Now, once you have identified a specific country you want to target, you will need communication targeted to that culture. Custom content for one particular country, not old content repackaged.

A blog may be the easiest tool to get to know your target country. You can also do this with a newsletter published for one cultural audience. The important thing is to have customized content written for one cultural market.

There may be translation costs involved. A blog will probably cost you more than a simple monthly newsletter. But a newsletter can be repurposed into several different forms of customized content such as articles, emails.

If your communication is directly targeting one specific culture, you will get better results than with you broad international targeting. Having custom content in either a blog or a newsletter reaching out to one foreign country is your first real presence in a foreign market. And you do not have to have offices there.

9. Track results and adjust your communication.

OK. So now you have a real presence in your target country. Guess what you next step is?
Stimulate and entice feedback. Track results. Adjust your communication to what you learn from your readers. Give them what they want to know. Test and start over

Business Management Tips

Thursday, February 4th, 2010

Business process is the important process of planning, co-coordinating and controlling a business. Every successful business has a business management team, whether it is one person or many. The main purpose of businesses is to be profitable, and the main function of managing businesses is so that the business creates sufficient value for its customers so that its revenues exceed its total cost. Business Management Styles .There is a big difference in the results we get, depending on what we are managing to get, and the management styles we use.

One spirals down, a death spiral. The other spirals up, up, and up. Marketing management: These books show you a way to design a marketing plan that works. It is also possible to find out some hitherto unknown factors such as some mistakes or false assumptions in your marketing methods, case studies discussed in such books. You might find some interesting new ideas that will be useful for your business.

A management position in the employment ranks is well-respected, but can be difficult to achieve. To efficiently and productively manage others, one must receive the proper training, education and experience. Earning a college degree or school certification in business management is imperative to accomplishing success in the business world. Correct management is definitely the key for a business to survive in crisis like what the world is meeting right now in terms of economy. But in order to execute correct business management, several strategies need to be observed and executed as well.

These are: smartening up of the business; marketing; management of people; and vision for the business. Networking Events - Keep an eye on business networking events in your town which may feature guest speakers on a variety of business-related topics. These events can include business groups, presentations, workshops, and other gatherings. For the price of a lunch or dinner you can learn more about the featured speaker’s area of expertise. 

If you do any kind of business in the virtual world, chances are you have hired a VA at some point to assist you with various tasks or projects. They might help you with your keyword research, shopping cart or autoresponder, etc., etc. Perhaps you have a team of VAs; maybe even a graphics designer, copywriter and a webmaster thrown in for good measure. If you do, that’s great! It’s a sign that your business is growing and thriving. Most business managers want to be on the good side of their employees. While this is a great thing to want, it is not a good idea to make it the main focus of what you are doing.

One of the key attributes in identifying management material in terms of staff, is that the person is willing to learn, and once this has been identified then you will be able to effectively train this person in sound business management training, procedures and techniques to at least increase the chances your business has in terms of survival. The graduates who have completed their online bachelor’s degree in business management(BM) is able to provide analysis of and suggest about how to improve the profits, productivity and the organizational structure of the company.