70% of comments on US health insurers across social media are negative; click to enlarage

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. Continue reading

Stuart Dixon is Program Director at Euro*MBA., ranked the #3 online business program in the world in 2010.

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. 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

Believe it or not, the key to effective global SEO is thinking locally.

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. Continue reading

Posted in SEO.
Guy Stephenson has worked with expatriate banks for more than 20 years. He believes that the market consolidation has opened up new business opportunities.

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. 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

Lukas Ritzel has spent more than 15 years helping companies coordinate media projects. He also lectures on media at IMI University Centre and other schools.

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. Continue reading

Expatriates on TwitterTwitter, the popular micro-blogging website, has seen a phenomenal rise, and in just under five years has reached over 200 million users (56 million of them active). Over 200 million tweets are generated per day, and the website handles 1.6 billion search queries daily. Clearly, Twitter is an influential tool.

This is especially true if you’re looking to target expats as there is an active expat community on Twitter. They talk about various subjects from their experience abroad, to daily life and their holidays. But most of all, they’re willing to amplify brand messages. Continue reading