Banking and finance are industries with a traditional, yet somewhat dry image. For marketers, it is often challenging to communicate their services without boring their target, especially when it comes to younger expatriates.
By sponsoring a banking poll across different social media sites, Lloyds TSB International aims to engage expatriates by opening a “fun” conversation about a seemingly boing topic. The participant with the most original expat banking story wins a new iPad 2.
How much expert knowledge do you need as an expat marketer?
Alison Massey has worked for Aetna, Goodhealth, Abbey and other major expat brands. As Marketing and E-commerce Director at Now Health International, she launched a new expat health insurance brand in January 2011.
In an interview with Expat Marketing, Alison explains what it meant to build a team of 50 people within a year – and how NowHealth wants to change the expat insurance market in the future.
If there’s one person with experience in marketing financial services to expats, it’s Guy Stephenson, Director at Nacelle. Having targeted expatriates since 1988, he has worked with many of the big expat brands in the market.
In an interview with Expat Marketing, Guy explains why more than 50% of British expat banks have disappeared in the last decade, and how this consolidation has opened business opportunities for new products and services.
Niklas Nikolaidis from Joinville runs a European network for ethnic marketing with more than 40 million unique visitors. Expat Marketing asked him how companies can target migrants online, and how the industry has evolved in the last decade.
In the US, ethnic marketing has been a major marketing topic for years. In Europe, only few companies run ethnic campaigns. How come?
That’s a very good question. In the US, there are big homogeneous ethnic markets like the Latin Americans with significant spending potential, and companies have noticed this. For example, migrants make up on third of of the market for fixed telephony, or an estimated 86 billion US dollars.
BNP Paribas launched a new expat banking brand in 2010, “The Bank for Expats”. Expat Marketing talked to Adel Nabhan, Marketing, Communication and Strategy Director at BNP Paribas Personal Investors (formerly Cortal Consors Luxembourg), about lessons from the campaign and his plans for the coming months.
Adel, you had been working with expats through BNP Paribas for years. Why did you launch a new expat brand last year?
What does it mean to live on a small island and run one of the world’s leading expat sites?
Julien Faliu, founder and CEO of Expat-Blog, explains how his site targets expats in multiple languages and how big brands can optimize their international expat campaigns.
Julien, how did you start with Expat-Blog?
I started Expat-Blog in 2005, when I was living between Madrid and London. I ran two blogs at the time, and noticed there were hundreds of bloggers like me. So I decided to create a space to share these experiences. Bit by bit, we added new features, like a Wiki that never worked – it was simply too complicated. (laughs)
If somebody tells you he is both “busy,” and that there are “not enough resources to deal with all the leads we’re getting,” you know he’s doing something right. Such is the case with Michael Lamb, Online Marketing Manager at Pacific Prime.
Michael–how do you manage SEO internally?
We tend to run SEO and SEM in one team, which is part of our IT department. A lot of the things we do rely on programmers, designers and writers. We manage all technology internally, ranging from SEO to on-site contact forms to client management.
Update: The following news turned out to be a hoax – covered by news websites worldwide. We’ll leave our original story online – enjoy!
“Some marketers have long suspected Internet Explorer users may not be the brightest folk–especially those using antiquated and outdated versions. But now it’s official: a study of web users’ IQs found IE users are the least intelligent of all browser users. Those using IE6 had an average IQ of 80, just short of mental disability (the cut-off is 70).
In the wake of survey results showing dissatisfied Facebook users and a sharp rise in advertising costs on Facebook, it would not surprise if many expat marketers were hoping for alternatives to Facebook’s monopoly. There are high hopes for Google+, which–despite being the product of a monopolist in another market–seems to offer at least a supplement to a Facebook-dominated social world.