Promote Your Business Internationally (4 of 4) – The Payoff: Two Months, $2 Million in Revenue Potential

During the past three days, we’ve covered the opportunity, campaign development and market-specific challenges of attempting to reach non-U.S. customers through search. Today, we’re going to share specific results of our program.

The chief beauty of doing search marketing in an emerging Internet market is that results can be seen very quickly. In terms of website traffic, visitors that spoke Spanish or Portuguese increased from less than 3% of total traffic to 34% within one month's time (an increase of over 1000%). We didn't lose any ground with English speaking visitors, either - the entire pie grew.

More importantly, leads from Latin America went through the roof. As of today, our client can trace over $2 million worth of opportunities in their sales pipeline directly to our Latin American search marketing campaign, with a gross revenue figure of nearly $500,000 that'll fall directly to their bottom line. And that doesn't even include the lifetime incremental value of the new business relationships forged. When you factor in that repeat and follow-up business represents a huge percentage of our client’s sales, the ultimate ROI of the test campaign is monumental.

With the success of this campaign, we are initiating a similar search marketing program to gain marketshare in China for our client.

If your website does not currently include in-language content for your target international markets, it’s time for you to make the plunge. Most prospects will search in their native language, and you need in-language content on your site to be found. Leveraging the reach of the search engines will allow you to quickly and cost-effectively reach prospects and capitalize on the business opportunity in front of you.

So to end, thanks to both Jennifer and Robert for allowing me the opportunity to be a guest blogger within their “friendly confines” this week – they provide a tremendous resource and I hope I was able to maintain their quality by providing something that was both informative and useful.