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?
Choosing the right websites for your expat marketing budget is crucial. Instead of contacting hundreds of small local sites, you might want to start with the heavyweights in the market. We have listed the top 10 expat websites according to their Alexa rankings.
Alexa is a subsidiary of Amazon, and ranks sites based mostly on tracking information of users of its Alexa Toolbar. Since the Toolbar is used by a limited tech-savvy audience, Alexa is not representative of the overall population. However, it does provide generally accepted global rankings for websites and certainly helps to identify the leading sites in a given market.
When it comes to research about moving abroad, the Internet is king. However, future expats are still looking for books about their new countries that they can take along on their move and have within easy reach.
This gives brands a unique opportunity to reach expats both online and offline in specialist, highly targeted publications. The major benefit of advertising within books is the fact that brands achieve multiple exposure, as expat books are a constant source of information for readers. In fact, most are read more than once and by more than one person.
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)
Social media has seen 
an enormous growth. According to a recent study by Pew Research Center, 65 per cent of adult Internet users claim to use a social networking site.
The rise of social media has forever changed the way that customers expect to interact with brands. To prove this, Nielsen published a report looking at the time Americans spend online. It found that e-mail’s share of time declined 28%, behind online gaming. Meanwhile, social networking climbed 43% and is the number one online activity in terms of time. While the data is for America, this trend is seen worldwide.
Tim Eldridge has been helping companies sell to expatriates for more than 25 years. Since he started, the industry has gone through significant changes – and not all of them are positive.
One of the major dangers for Tim is the loss of industry experience due to centralization. “The current trend to centralise media buying through a single agency is often driven by procurement to gain short term cost benefits”, says Tim. “In many cases, this means specialist business units are forced to end long-term relationships with market specialists to conform to group policies.”
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).
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.
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.