5 Tips to Start Marketing Your IT Applications Globally
Identifying your target markets
We all know that certain applications do not work in your home country; so what should you do? You should export them! Recently we started a program for Cleantech software, a program that analyses the carbon emission usage and comes up with recommendations on how to save energy. This product did not receive much attention; but had been widely adopted in Australia and also in the United States.
We are also assisting a number of European applications that integrate with Google Apps and Google Docs; while the local markets are small; they have opened many opportunities in the North American market.
Similar stories can be heard everyday. When it comes to looking for new markets we often advise our clients to look at different markets. Do not rule out the US. Consider China, India and Brazil, and also the European markets.
Promoting Your Product to your target market
Once you have identified your target market, promotion and marketing towards potential customers is key. You can use social media to publicize your application, and even use livestreams to demonstrate how it can be used. A great way to gain a wide audience on your livestreams is to use services like StreamOZ. You will be able to market your application to a wide and diverse audience in this way.
Understanding if there is a legislation changes
Another good strategy is to look at the trends; and often legislation changes are great opportunities. We had recently assisted a Telecommunications company to launch into Australia and European markets; because of the changes in the Occupational Health & Safety requirements; which require companies to provide analysis of microwaves and emissions in order to ensure the safety of their engineers.
Localization of your website
We refer to a popular PDF program as an example which is a Romanian product. When it first launched its product it was never intended for the Romanian market. It started to get into international markets by asking partners to assist them with translations and localizations. In exchange for product resellers and higher profit sharing arrangements.
Understanding the “Local Search Engine” markets
We helped an IT company launching from the UK into China recently. The company had tried to get into the Chinese market through SEO for 3 years without much success. We advised them that Chinese hardly use Google for web search and advised them to use the popular search engines to test the market. We have also changed their keywords; as they were using “Direct Translations” which is not the way the consumers use.
Never use automatic translation software
A large number of companies are trying to save the cost by using automatic translation software; take my words for it; DON’T use them; they provide word-to-word translations. You will end up with ridiculous translations like “For more information, please contact US”; or “For more information, please contact your Mistress on this floor” on hotel websites; also “The hotel provides free beach surfing on Internet” (Free Internet Surfing). I can give you at least 1000 more stupid examples.
I can’t emphasize just how embarrassing it can be to use these automatic software, in December, I typed in “Give me a hand again” in Google Translation, and they continue to translate it as “Please give a single hand”, the same problem still occurs despite of what the software companies are telling you.
One of my translators has used Google translation for an entire piece of translation I have sent him recently, it was a simple biography of an author, it is not more than 200 words; at the end of the translation, less than 10% of the works can be used. That’s right! Less than 10%, even Contact Us for more details has been translated into “Contact USA for more details” as I have said before.
I hope I have laid out enough scary stories to persuade you off using the translation software. The very least you should do is to hire “Translation Editors”, give it to someone to proofread the translated texts, you can hire these professionals through online project marketplaces such as elance, guru or even talking to us if you are interested.
Useful Tips:
Now News
www.nownews.com
We use Nownews.com quite often to distribute news articles, including press releases. Now News is a popular Chinese language based news distribution service based in Taiwan, once published, its articles are often published around Chinese language portals in China, Taiwan and Hong Kong, they are often being distributed on Yahoo, Sina and Google.
Although your articles are not guaranteed “published” all the time, if they do get published, you can often achieve high visibility which will help your SEO and ranking for your website.
The downside is news articles do not last very long in Asia, especially China, on some websites, they could just last for a few seconds; this means you do need to publish regular news articles using these services.
Now News is especially useful to publish information related to sports, services and hospitality & travel industries.
PR Express
www.prexpress.cn
For those familiar with new distribution channels like PR Web or BusinessWire, this is the Chinese version of such service. It is a fee-based service, and this often-mean better coverage and higher probability that these articles will be published around the web. We have used this service frequently; articles should be produced in Chinese already with good editing and keywords identified in the article.
PR Express is a Chinese company, and its coverage is mostly distributed around the key Chinese news websites. The services also offer useful reporting functions as in the case of PR Web where you can track the number of visits with useful statistics.
Keyword Density
What kind of keyword density should you achieve in Chinese? Generally speaking, this is not much different from English language campaigns, where 6% to 8% keyword density is usually recommended.
In our case, we usually go for minimum 5% and up to 10% keyword density, anything over 10%, and then the article starts to become too promotional.
Depending on your target audiences, the older Chinese population tend to write tedious and often find complicated paragraphs with a lot of jargon and to be honest, quite boring; they do so to show off their language skill or to impress Government officials.
The vast net population in China are those age’s 18 to 40 years old; they are often known as “New Chinese”. Their way of thinking is often more straightforward, their mentality and culture are similar to those in the West. They like to read “Plain Chinese”, straight-to-the points.
From a marketing point of view, we often find writing articles with bullet points or numberings are quite effective to achieve a high keyword density rate. It is also useful to break a long article into 2 or 3 parts; we often do this if we need to publish a research report or a management interview in Chinese.
