International B2B Marketing Strategies

Grow Abroad With Our International B2B marketing Strategies

Are you a B2B that exports internationally or are you looking to expand abroad? Then our International B2B marketing strategy is what you need.

This strategy, which Mintense has been honing for more than 17 years, will increment your brand’s value and increase your sales. It’s an effective method of helping Italian firms to foreign countries around the world. It increases sales, helps distributors, allows you to find new import partners and ensures a boost in your visibility in fairs. It is not only addressed to those who export but also to EMEA firms that have a need for a European strategy in multiple languages. Furthermore, it is also helpful to multinationals wanting to invest in Europe and to those that want to implement an international strategy.

Multilingual Search Engines

For any kind of business, getting to the top of search engines is fundamental to beat out the competition and ensure potential customers find your products online.

When it comes to internationalisation, SEO optimisation has to therefore be done in different languages. Special focus is also needed on the language and cultural differences between countries. For example, targeting the UK market would require the use of British English, while a US-targeted campaign should use American English. Furthermore, a deep understanding of the target market’s opportunities and challenges allows to better optimise an international B2B strategy. Mintense has significant experience in this field. These are the steps we take to optimise your website:

• Analysis of your business and of your competitors

• Establishment of a local presence in the countries of interest through the insertion of the client’s business on Google, Bing and other local mapping services

• Multilingual SEO optimisation to help your business easily found from abroad

• Optimisation of your website for mobile-responsiveness to allow users to find your business when searching on their smartphones and tablets
  

Multilingual Pay-Per-Click

Within our International B2B strategy, we will run multilingual Pay-Per-Click (PPC) campaigns on multiple search engines including Google and Bing. The objective is that of immediate lead generation to increase your number of contacts, prospects and new potential clients. The types of multilingual PPC campaigns we conduct are:

SEARCH CAMPAIGNS

These campaigns allows your website to appear for the keywords of the relevant business sector in the form of adverts. Thanks to the option of geo-localisation, based on the search engine user’s location, we can implement multilingual campaigns in English, German, French, Dutch and Spanish. That means attracting potential customers in the markets you want to export to.

SEARCH NETWORK CAMPAIGNS

Search campaigns allow your website to appear in the top search results when certain keywords are searched by users, in the form of adverts. Thanks to the geo-localisation of adverts, based on the location of where the search occurs, we can build multilingual campaigns (English, German, French, Dutch, Spanish) to attract potential customers from the countries where you want to export.

DISPLAY CAMPAIGNS

This allows to find new users offline as well. Geo-localised display campaigns will show your ad banners to users browsing Google’s partner websites, in geographical areas of your interest.

REMARKETING/RETARGETING CAMPAIGNS

With remarketing campaigns we “chase” users which have already shown interest in your business. This type of PPC campaign will show your ads to those who have already visited your website, reminding them to return.

MOBILE CAMPAIGNS

Thanks to mobile geo-localised campaigns we will show your text and image adverts on smartphones, tablets and apps. Your business will be able to attract potential customers in specific areas that use mobile devices to do searches on Google and browse Google’s partner websites.

CAMPAIGNS TO PROMOTE INTERNATIONAL FAIRS

We can create online multilingual marketing campaigns for international fairs, following these steps: 

• Pre-fair campaign to inform your target audience of your participation in a determined fair

• Proximity/visibility campaigns during the fair to invite potential customers to visit your stand using all available channels, including Google Ads, Facebook Ads, LinkedIn Ads, and Instagram Ads

• Post-fair re-marketing, to remind who visited your stand to visit your website and to contact you

LinkedIn Ads

Having a presence on LinkedIn is very important for B2B firms wanting to internationalise. LinkedIn is the world’s largest social network for professionals, and allows for very precise audience targeting and profiling. We create campaigns on LinkedIn to:

• Increase the web traffic of your company’s website

• Boost your brand’s visibility and popularity

• Learn more about your target audience

• Generate new leads and acquire new contacts
  

Multilingual Website

We can create for you a website with multiple domains, national domains and subdomains. Before implementing a marketing strategy, a business wanting to expand outside of Italy needs to have a professionally-made multilingual website which is SEO-friendly and with a clear brand image. That is why we have developed a multilingual and multi-site CMS software that allows for a centralised management for large EMEA firms and firms exporting to many foreign markets.

Consulting

Our consulting activity starts with contact acquisition and finishes with sales generation, helping your internationalisation process. If you are a B2B business that exports or wants to export, an EMEA firm or a multinational with European or global ambitions, choose our international B2B strategy to make it happen. Contact us now!

Which market should you open first?

The market where demand already exists and you can actually serve it. Before any translation work, we look at where searches for your category are made, which competitors already rank there, how the category is described locally, and whether your commercial set up, distributor, agent or direct shipping, can handle an enquiry once it arrives. A country with strong demand and no route to fulfil an order is a country to postpone.

Sequencing matters more than coverage. Opening five languages at once spreads the budget thinly and leaves nothing conclusive to learn from. Two markets, properly resourced, will tell you whether the proposition travels, which objections come up locally, and what a qualified enquiry costs, before you commit to the rest of Europe.

The choice is a language decision as much as a border one. Belgium needs French and Dutch, Switzerland can need German, French and Italian, and one English site covers neither. Working across 16 languages means the map is planned around how buyers search rather than around a list of countries.

How do you market through distributors and local partners?

When you sell through distributors your website has two audiences: the end buyer who needs to find the product, and the partner who needs to sell it. Both should be served explicitly. A clear route to a local partner sends qualified demand where it can be handled instead of stranding it on a generic contact form, whilst a partner area gives distributors the specifications, images and translated copy they need.

Generated demand is also the strongest argument you can put to a distributor. Enquiries passed on in their own language, from their own territory, make the relationship worth keeping and give you a reasonable basis for asking what became of them.

It protects your brand as well. Where partners run campaigns of their own, agreeing terminology, product naming and which keywords belong to whom stops you bidding against your own network and paying twice for the same click.

How do you measure a sales cycle that lasts months?

An industrial sale rarely closes in the session it starts. First contact might be a technical article read in German, then a specification download, then a stand visit, then a quotation months later. Judging campaigns on the last click alone makes the channels that opened the conversation look worthless, and those are usually the ones you cannot afford to switch off.

The practical fix is to record the stages you can see: enquiry, qualified enquiry, quotation, order. Even a single field on your CRM holding the language and country of first contact tells you more after a year than any dashboard metric. Cost per qualified enquiry by market is then the number worth reading, not cost per click.

Patience belongs in the plan too. In a long cycle the early months produce learning and pipeline rather than invoices, and the budget should be set with that in mind. No agency can promise a closing date on a decision that goes through a procurement committee.

FAQ, international B2B marketing

How long does it take to see results from an international B2B campaign?

Paid campaigns can produce enquiries within the first few weeks, whilst organic visibility in a new language usually takes several months to settle. The gap is normal: advertising buys attention immediately, whereas rankings depend on pages being crawled, understood and trusted in the local market. Add a B2B sales cycle that often runs for months and the fair first review point is the pipeline you have built, not the orders you have closed.

Do you need a separate website for each country?

Usually not. Most exporters are better served by one website with a clear language and country structure, whether that uses subdirectories, subdomains or national domains. Separate sites multiply maintenance, split your authority and are difficult to keep consistent. A single multilingual platform, correctly signposted to search engines, lets you add a language without rebuilding anything. Separate national domains earn their keep when you have local entities, local teams and genuinely different catalogues.

Is translating your existing website enough?

No. Translation moves the words, but it does not move the search terms, the objections or the units of measure. Buyers in different markets describe the same product differently, compare it against different competitors and expect different proof, from certifications to references. The workable approach is to translate the structure and rewrite the parts that sell: headings, product descriptions, technical detail and calls to action, using the vocabulary your buyers actually type.

How much should you budget for entering a new market?

There is no single figure, because it depends on how competitive your category is in that country and how many languages you open at once. What can be said honestly is that a budget split across too many markets tends to prove nothing. A smaller sum concentrated on one or two countries, held steady long enough to gather data, gives you a cost per qualified enquiry you can plan against. Amounts in GBP are agreed before work starts.

How should trade shows fit with the rest of the plan?

Trade shows work best as a moment inside a continuous programme rather than as the programme itself. The weeks before the event are used to tell your target audience you will be there, the days of the event to reach visitors nearby, and the weeks afterwards to reconnect with the people who came to the stand. Treated this way the fair becomes a lead source your website keeps working on long after the hall has emptied.