Graphic ranking online media channels
A ranked list of the website types consumers use to research products. (US data; Bynd.com)

How do you generate more sales? The big buzz is always social media but that is just the tip of the iceberg. Especially for expatriate products, more purchase interest seems to come from online channels other than Facebook and Twitter.

Expat purchases are normally ‘high involvement’ products such as health insurance coverage, personal finance, or real estate. Interestingly, a study by Joann DeLanoy explains that for high-involvement products, people use web search before using Twitter or Facebook. Continue reading

Migration from UK to Poland
Polish expats return home

Many Polish expats who had moved to the UK to make a better life for themselves are now returning home to Poland. For companies targeting foreigners, this change creates new business opportunities.

A study from UK National Board of statistics discovered that the most popular destination for non-British people was Poland – and that 98% of people moving there are Polish.

Poles have traditionally represented a large percentage of immigrants coming into the UK. Many believe the reason for the Poles abandoning the UK now, could be due to the fact that the economic gap between the two countries is closing considerably. Continue reading

Most British expats need a confirmed job before leaving the UK
Most British expats need a confirmed job before leaving the UK

It seems an overwhelming number of Brits won’t move abroad until they have a job lined up in their new country.

Latest research by the Office for National Statistics reveals that 40% of British expats chose to leave the UK only if there was a guaranteed job waiting for them – compared to 16% who were looking for work.

This is great news for international recruiters and other expat marketers, as it pinpoints Brits who haven’t yet left the country as a massive target market. Continue reading

Expats can make use of digital tools such as the ipad.
Wouldn't making it easier for expats to download content present a massive opportunity for expat marketers?

For the media-hungry expat, portable devices like iPads and Kindles are a godsend. But if expats are clearly a perfect demographic, why is it so difficult for us to access the content from abroad and why are we subjected to such irrelevant marketing?

For example, the other day I tried to download a game to my PSP (PlayStation Portable) device. I’m an English expat living in Spain, so I tried to use the Spanish PlayStation Store to make the purchase. However, there was no option to download an English-language game, it automatically assumed that because I was based in Spain that Spanish was my first language and I’d only be interested in Spanish products. Continue reading

expat marketing online advertising graph
Source: Interactive Ad Bureau; click to enlarge

Given it’s a new year we at Expat Marketing are looking ahead to major issues marketers will face over the next 12 months.

For private medical insurers there are plenty: a likely decline in the effectiveness of traditional display advertising, greater consumer focus on prices and, lastly, a need to more clearly differentiate their brands from the competition.

It used to be health insurance companies could basically throw up display ads and wait for customers to come to them–obviously that’s no longer true. Continue reading

The Expat Banking Poll aims to engage expats on a seemingly boring topic.

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. Continue reading

Alison Massey has built a new expat health insurance brand within a year.

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. Continue reading

If there is a phone number, leads from online campaigns become hard to measure.

Following on from the problems highlighted here: The dirty secret of online marketing – let’s take a look at some of the challenges around properly measuring lead sources when the customer calls you.

Unless your website doesn’t have a phone number on it, some of the visitors to the site will call. To make this very clear, if you are not able to measure inbound calls and attribute them into your reporting on campaign effectiveness you will have flawed data. Bad data almost always leads to bad decision-making. Continue reading

Niklas Nikolaidis thinks that ethnic marketing will become more relevant

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. Continue reading

When banners started appearing on the Internet, it seemed to be a marketeer’s wet-dream. We can finally measure! The click became king, the magic gauge with which an advertising message could be judged. So much better than TV, a poster or a double-spread in a magazine…

Fast-forward a decade or so and the dream now looks more like a measurement nightmare. Most advertisers have more-or-less managed to properly measure clicks. However, what happens post-click is still a mystery to most people. This is because it turns out that online advertising only solved a small part of the puzzle of “how much do I get back if I spend $X here?” As a higher percentage of spend migrates online, this becomes ever more important to get right. Continue reading