How frustrating must it be to have a pile of money in plain sight, yet be unable to get your hands on it?
That’s the case for many banks and financial services firms when it comes to young expat professionals. They see huge revenue potential, but often fail to get their message across.
Rupert Bedell, Head of Group Marketing at Moneycorp, talks to Expat Marketing about the challenges facing financial services firms trying to reach young expat professionals.
International health insurers and banks get little love from social media, according to a recent report from Amplicate, which monitors topics and opinions across social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter. Amplicate found 70% of all opinions expressed on US health insurance companies over the last 12 months were negative.
Aetna earned the unwelcome distinction of most hated insurer. Only 9% of users expressing positive views of the company in the last year. Believe it or not, however, the industry has actually fared worse on social media in the past.
Many business programs suffer from a lack of international recognition, says Dr. Stuart Dixon, Program Director at Euro*MBA (which The Economist ranked as the world’s #3 online business school in 2010). Top national programs therefore fail to appear on expats’ radars.
Dixon talks to Expat Marketing about how business schools can use online learning to target up-and-coming expat professionals.
Reaching a global expatriate audience requires more than flashy web design.
Key to quality expat SEO is optimization in multiple languages. Google Translate just won’t cut it.
As John Tavadros, COO of iProspect, recently observed:
‘But can’t I just optimize my site and translate it?’ I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard that from large global organizations […] To be most effective, content needs be localized in many ways.
Young expat professionals do not respond to traditional campaigns. They’re not interested in photos of dressed up models or sanitized PR speak. What they crave for is authenticity, says Lukas Ritzel, Marketing & Web Strategist at Switzerland’s IMI University Centre–and they’re looking for it on social media sites. In an interview with Expat Marketing, Lukas explains why traditional marketing managers are struggling to cope.
Expats come in all shapes and sizes, but surveys have shown a few characteristics stand out. For a long time, expats have tended to be better educated and wealthier than other target groups. However, recent data suggests that there is also a shift of wealth – away from traditional expat markets towards emerging markets.
Indeed, HSBC’s 2010 Expat Explorer Survey found growing markets for luxury goods in emerging economies such as South Africa and the UAE. According to the HSBC data, 61% of expats reported they were saving more than in their home country, though interestingly another 43% said they were also spending more and 38% that they were investing more.
Social media is one of the most powerful, yet also most frustrating tools available to an expat marketeer. For every success story there are countless firms (especially small businesses) that utterly fail to develop a social media presence.
So what separates the successes from failures? Expat Marketing talked to Anne Lutgerink, Communications Officer at the Netherlands Organization for Cooperation in International Education (NUFFIC).
As most expat marketers know, Google has caught plenty of flak for having launched Google+ without support for business profiles. Is it in for more now that the pay-for-SEO business is eyeing the site’s +1s?
Incredibly, the Plussem.com Social Media Shop is already poised to cash in.
In Plussem’s own words:
Google are [sic] now striking back at Facebook with there [sic] version of the Like button. This will be used to judge contents [sic] worth by using real people to rate it rather than there [sic] own bots. To cheat the searching algorithm be sure to get the ball rolling for your site by purchasing Plus Ones.
Any business targeting expats–whether it’s a huge multinational or a web start-up–faces the hurdle of multiple languages. Chances are your customer base reads at least a little English, but it probably isn’t their language of choice.
Consider the findings of the 2006 book Can’t Read, Won’t Buy, which showed 90% of shoppers wanted access to online information in their native languages. A 2011 EU survey found the same holds true today: 90% of Europeans prefer to browse the web in their mother tongue.
David Mercer tackled the question of whether it’s better to blog or run a forum on Business Insider. Blogs and forums are like bread and butter to the expat business, allowing companies to target expat communities with highly specific information and build business by word-of-mouth. They also help boost visibility in the SEO rankings:
conventional wisdom dictates that a blog is the best way to build up a decent body of highly engaging, relevant and SEO enhanced content, over time. This is certainly true and blogs have proven their worth time and time again.