An increasingly used term in the corporate world is that of “digital internationalisation”. What does it mean? It means opening the doors of your company to exporting internationally with the support of digital marketing. This support is fundamental to be able to make your business truly competitive in different markets. An adequate online presence can make all the difference in helping you find new leads, potential customers, and generally increasing your company’s international profile.
Internationalisation is a process that requires specific competencies and resources, regardless of what the final goal is. Increasing revenues, boosting the competitiveness of the business, or stimulating research and development, are only some of the potential goals to aspire to. This remains, in the final instance, a strategic choice.
Digital marketing as a tool for company internationalisation
Speaking of strategies, the importance of digital marketing in the internationalisation process can never be underestimated. Using web channels to develop your commercial network, analysing foreign market trends, and creating offers personalised for your target audience, are only some of the benefits that digital marketing can offer.
The first step for a multilingual digital marketing strategy is that of studying the market and the competition in the foreign market of interest. It is then time to choose the channels which are best suited to showcasing the company’s products or services online.
The digital marketing activities that are of fundamental importance in the internationalisation process are:
SEO (Search Engine Optimisation): the process of optimising a website so that it can be found by online search engines. It is very important to assess and improve your online visibility. Being indexed by Google is not enough. What actually counts is achieving a good search ranking position, to give your company the most visibility possible.
SEA (Search Engine Advertising) and PPC (Pay-per-Click): advertising on search engines, which offers online marketing cost optimisation. SEA enables you to advertise with Google Ads and Microsoft Advertising to reach potential customers through targeted campaigns. This allows you to spend your advertising budget only when potential customers have clicked on your ads, in addition to showing them on the first page of search engine results.
Social Media Marketing: to establish a relationship with customers. This reinforces and increases the loyalty of existing customers, while reaching out to potential new ones interested in your product or service. It also allows you to communicate with your customers effectively.
To be visible in foreign markets, the most effective path is to collaborate with a digital marketing agency specialised in multilingual international SEO. Contact us now to find out how Mintense can help your company grow its profile abroad.
What changes in your company, and what does not?
The tools barely change when you start selling abroad. The search engines, the advertising platforms and the analytics are the ones you already use. What changes is everything around them.
Someone has to own the foreign enquiry. Someone has to answer it in the language it was written in, within a working day, allowing for a time difference. Someone has to quote in the right currency, on terms of delivery a foreign buyer recognises. Someone has to know whether you can supply that country at all, with what documentation and what warranty.
Most internationalisation projects stall on those questions rather than on marketing. A campaign that produces enquiries nobody answers for four days is a project started in the wrong order, not a marketing success the business failed to convert. Settle who answers, in which language, how quickly and with what authority, before you spend anything on visibility.
Which market should you open first?
The instinct is to open several at once, because the marginal cost of one more language looks small. In practice every market carries a cost you only meet later: enquiries to answer, content to keep current, a partner to manage and a sales cycle to fund.
Sensible ways to order the list:
- countries that already write to you unprompted, which is demand you have not paid for
- countries where you have a distributor, an agent or a customer willing to act as a reference
- markets close to your own in regulation, standards and logistics
- markets where you can support the customer after the sale, not only reach them before it
Size of demand comes after all of that. A large market you cannot serve is worse than a small one you can, because the enquiries still arrive and the disappointment is public. One country done properly becomes a template you can repeat. Five done thinly is a year spent learning nothing.
Does everything have to be translated at once?
No, and trying to is how these projects run out of budget before they produce anything. Translation is not a one off cost either: from then on every page has to be maintained in every language.
Stage it. The pages carrying the commercial argument come first: what you make, who it is for, the evidence and how to get in touch. The blog and the archive follow once the market shows signs of life. Legal text, terms of sale and anything that creates an obligation deserve proper handling rather than speed.
Machine translation is a reasonable first draft and a poor final version. The words that decide whether a buyer trusts you are the technical and commercial ones, and those are exactly the words automated translation gets wrong. A native reviewer who knows your sector is worth more than a larger volume of unchecked text.
How do you measure something that takes months to close?
Revenue is the honest measure and the slowest one. If your cycle runs to six months or more, waiting for it means steering with a signal a year out of date, so you need indicators that move earlier without lying to you.
Record the country and the language on every enquiry, in your CRM rather than in a spreadsheet somebody owns personally. Separate the enquiries that met your qualification criteria from the ones that did not. Track how many reached a quotation. Those three numbers tell you within a quarter whether a market behaves differently from your domestic one, and they survive the awkward fact that the last click before a form is never the whole story for a B2B buyer.
FAQ, digital internationalisation
What does digital internationalisation mean in practice?
It means using digital channels to find, win and support customers outside your home market, and reorganising the company so it can actually serve them. In practice that covers the website and its languages, search visibility, advertising, the enquiry process and the people who answer. The digital part is the visible half. The half that decides whether it works is internal: who owns the foreign customer, and what you can genuinely promise them.
Can we simply translate the website we already have?
Translation is the starting point, not the finished job. Your domestic site was written for readers who already know your market, your standards and your reputation, and none of that crosses a border with the words. Expect to rewrite the pages that make the commercial case, adapt the evidence to something the new market recognises, and add the practical detail a foreign buyer needs, such as delivery terms, support coverage and who to contact locally.
Do we need a local company or a local address to sell abroad?
Not to begin with, in most cases. Plenty of exporters sell across Europe from a single base, either directly or through distributors. What buyers look for is evidence that you can support them: a contact route in their language, realistic delivery terms and somebody reachable in their working hours. A local legal entity becomes worth the cost when tax, employment or after sales service demand it, rather than as a marketing gesture.
How much does it cost to open one new market?
There is no standard figure, and anyone offering one has not asked enough questions. The cost is driven by how many pages need translating and maintaining, whether you advertise while organic visibility builds, whether you exhibit, and how much internal time goes into answering enquiries. Budget for at least a year before judging it, because in long cycle sectors the spending comes first and the revenue arrives once the pipeline has matured.
Should international marketing be run internally or by an agency?
Usually both, with the split decided by what only you can do. Product knowledge, technical accuracy, pricing and the sales follow up have to stay inside the company. Language coverage, campaign management and the technical side of the website are the parts most exporters cannot staff for several markets at once. What matters more than the split is that one named person internally owns the outcome, otherwise nobody chases the enquiry.
