Before we dive into any tips, there is a key question to ask yourself.
Is your current website working?
You should be able to quickly answer business-related questions such as:
- Is your website driving leads?
- Is it bringing in the right sort of business?
- Are you seeing a return on investment in relation to any PPC campaigns?
Further to these core questions, it’s also important to consider whether your website is suitable in your current market. Like most things, having a good starting point is beneficial and for us, this starting point is to ensure your current site is performing well.
Now that you’ve taken a moment to reflect on your site, here are some tips we’d recommend if you are looking to export:
1) Decide on your target and ensure you can answer key questions about them
There are two major elements to consider here - where geographically do you want to focus and then within that geographic area, who is your target audience? To determine this you can ask yourself some key questions:
- Who is your target demographic? (This includes age group, gender, marital status, etc.)
- What language does your target audience speak?
- What does this audience want to see?
- What is your company’s differentiating factor?
- Why would they pick you?
The answers to these questions will help you create the ideal personas for your target audience. Once you can answer these questions, you are in a strong position in order to be able to ensure your website is designed with this target audience in mind. This information will help you make the right decisions in relation to content and what you need to communicate.
2) Know your competition
This isn’t the first time you’ve seen this and certainly won't be the last, but this is an all important aspect of this process.
There are two key takeaways here. Firstly, what are you up against? It’s important to have an understanding of the full competitive landscape and know who your competitors are at all levels. Secondly, what is your differentiating factor? Knowing your competitive advantage will help you drive business decisions not only digitally but across all business aspects.
3) Localise your website
If you can answer the questions posed above (or at least most of them), you can begin making website decisions. As a starting point, it’s pivotal to localise your site and content with your target audience in mind. This includes:
- Language
- Relevant case studies (ideally growing them to include case studies from your target country)
- Domain - will a .com work to cover all site content? Or would a local domain work better and ensure a higher level of trust with your user?
- Address/contact details - another important factor in relation to building local trust. Especially in relation to eCommerce sites. People want to see you are local and that they contact you if anything goes wrong.
- Local legal requirements - always get good local advice to ensure your site is legally compliant.
4) Test the market
Once you have a localised website ready to go…get testing! A good starting point may be running a local Adwords campaign that is targeted both geographically and in relation to your target keywords. This type of campaign ensures you can get instant traffic to the website and can begin to test how the user is interacting. The data gathered here is extremely valuable in that it allows you to provide a quick snapshot of what's working and what’s not. Based on this snapshot you can make the necessary tweaks to ensure optimal performance.
If you’re stuck on a particular part of this process, need some help, or have any questions drop us an email at sales@kooba.ie or give us a call at +353 1 444 6677.
