W.M.T: Bill Dunlap: you are considered worldwide today one of the most important experts in the localization of web marketing strategies, do you feel like a pioneer?
A: Pioneer is certainly the right word, since I started this work in late 1995 when there were only 40 million people online worldwide, and the Internet was nearly an exclusive English language environment. Throughout 1994 and 1995 I kept reading articles about the Web and the Internet, stating that the Net was going to have a strong impact on international business. So I spent a summer in San Francisco, learned what there was to learn about online marketing, and returned home to France to apply this to my company. My company is called "Euro-Marketing Associates", and for a while the multilingual Web promotion services went under the name "EuroLinks". But we finally settled on "Global Reach" as an identity, since, from an American perspective, it's not just Europe that matters: American companies want to address the world market.
Surprisingly enough, there have been very few competitors develop yet that I've been able to find. If they're around, they are doing a good job of hiding. Of course, every country has several leading Web promotion companies for their own language(s), but there are no other companies that offer Web promotion in all (relevant) languages, across the board. This is our strength at Global Reach, by providing a one-stop source for anyone wanting to target other country markets (even his own market).
This being said, there is still not much of a market for cross-border online marketing. Companies are doing their best just in learning how to use the Internet to address their own countries' marketing. But we think that, after a company masters its own online marketing in its own country, they will want to use the Internet to market elsewhere. After all, the Internet makes it just as easy to target half-way across the world as it is to target across the street. One other big factor in holding up international online marketing is the Y2K problem, which is draining many marketing budgets last year and this year. The world will be a very different place a year from now, when we can forget the Y2K bug and get on with business.
W.M.T: How did you start with Web Marketing?
A: Let me compare it to the birth of the PC industry. Back in 1981, I was living in San Francisco, and started noticing a bit of L.A. creeping into the southern part of the Bay Area. It was starting to be called "Silicon Valley", although at the time IBM did not make a PC, and most computers were only used for very primitive games. But there was so much interest about the "computer revolution" that I thought it might be a good idea to export software and peripherals to Europe, since I had just returned from living in Europe. After a few years of doing this, I found myself launching AST and Compaq Computer in Europe in the mid-1980s, and saw what nice budgets could mean.
We are in the same situation now with the Internet as we were with the PC back in the early 1980s. Except, from what most American writers say, this time it's going to be a lot, lot bigger and much faster growth than the computer revolution of the 1980s. Fortune Magazine recently reported that businesses bought and sold $43 billion in goods over the Internet last year, and $8 billion bought by consumers (Forrester Research estimates). By 2003 more than 90% of the predicted $1.4 trillion in Internet commerce is expected be conducted between businesses, and 20% of the American economy will be handled over the Internet. We are onto something big, it seems.
It doesn't take much thinking to perceive the worldwide, global dimension of Internet business. That should be pretty obvious. When I first started learning about the Internet in 1995, this idea occured to me, since it was an extension of what I had been doing for many years in the physical world: bringing American companies to Europe. Except that now, it would be a matter of using the Internet for marketing and sales, not the classic distributor model. The Internet will make it much easier and affordable for smaller companies to "go global". Without even having to travel to all those countries, interview and choose distributors, and build up their export business, as companies have done for centuries.
But there is one more element that makes this good business, one more reason to add to the importance of "going online" and "going global". There is only one element that is still necessary in this recipe: Web traffic. Once you have decided to place your business online, and you start translating your site so that people from other countries can understand what you're selling -- what good does that do if no one comes? So it becomes extremely important for a Website to invest in attracting qualified visitors to their site. Traffic turns into sales. That is what Website owners want: traffic, ever more visitors. Being in the Web traffic-building business turns out to be a good business model too, since promotion and advertising are ongoing expenses for a Website, not just a one-shot deal. You only stop a Web promotion budget when you lost interest in attracting more visitors to your Website.
W.M.T you have invented the term "Targetting by Language": what does it mean?
It came up spontaneously in a conference last year in New York about Internet Advertising. My partner was in the audience and used the term "targeting by language", and everyone started to perk up. American marketers love to use the word "targeting", as well as using business skills to target certain markets. But Americans never think in terms of using language to target, since they honestly think that the entire world speaks English; besides, there are so many ways of targeting marketing to keep them busy, without having to worry about language too. But it was clear at that point, from the instant popularity of the idea of "targeting by language", that this was a good way of talking about "international online marketing". At least to marketing and advertising people.
W.M.T. What are the most popular languages on the Internet? What do you think will be the languages that will be more common on the Internet in the near future?
A: Besides English, which will represent less than half of the entire world's online population by 2000, there are 15 languages with over a million people online. As of latest count (see euromktg.com/globstats for the latest updated figures), Spanish, German and Japanese all have around 14 million people online, followed by French (7.2 million), Chinese (6.4 million), Scandinavians (6.1 million) and Dutch (4.2 million). By the end of 2000, Spanish, German, French and Japanese should each increase to 25-30 million people online, and Italian to 10-13 million.
It's strange how American market research firms (like IDC, Forrester, eMarketer or Gartner Group) have a tendency of totally ignoring market research about other countries' statistics that is generated in these very countries. They always give a lower number than the market research companies in the countries in question. But why? Would they prefer to ignore the research that happens on the spot in a country? Perhaps they don't even know about it. Perhaps they just want to refuse to believe that so many people are online outside the U.S. Or perhaps they mistrust any research methods not their own. It makes you wonder.
However, all this being said, one has to bridle one's enthusiasm about Hispanic and Chinese online populations, simply because of the average salary being so low (Latin American salaries are 1/3 of U.S./European salaries, Chinese even lower). That means that most companies should concentrate on German and Japanese, then the French, the Scandinavians and the Dutch. Depending on what one has to sell, the Hispanic and Chinese markets might or might not be all that important.
Our company stays away from English-language Web promotion, since there are so many companies involved with Web promotion in the U.S. now. Besides, only 7 countries use English as a mother tongue, representing 7% of the world's population, 26% of its economy, and 55% of online population. English may have been the place to be on the Internet in the past, but it isn't any more. There is a tremendous opportunity there to address non-English-speaking markets.
W.M.T.: How can a little Italian company start to promote their products/services on the Net worldwide, considering the fact they have a limited budget?
A: I would tell them to start out slowly with two or three languages on your site: translate just one page and reference it in 10-20 indexes and search engines for that language. This is not expensive. But this is not really marketing -- it has about the same marketing value as listing your company to the local phone book. You wouldn't call that "marketing", but you'd never run a business without being listed in there, would you? Then, when you are ready to do proper online marketing in other countries, target one new languages zone at a time. Get some success under your belt, and go back for more online marketing budget, to tackle another linguistic zone. One of the best cost-effective techniques is to optimize a Web page for certain keywords for top local indexes (like Virgilio). This is not expensive, and it makes it easier for people to find you.
W.M.T.: How is it possible to build a strategic plan for someone who want to organize a multilingual promotion of his website?
A: Step by step: a roll-out plan. Make a goal for a specific country or language zone. When the goal is reached, continue the pressure there, but open up a new market as well. Gradually you will build a fully functional multilingual Website and this can develop to all 10-15 linguistic markets.
Also experiment with various techniques and measure the results. Don't keep on using what doesn't work. Make every Web promotion technique go to a different gateway page to your site, so you can determine how many people came to your site because of each technique.
W.M.T.: What are the most important tools for the website promotion?
A: There are several techniques our Internet marketing specialists use in each country. For a multilingual site, English is simply not enough. You would initially need at least one page in each language -- sometimes one page is sufficient, as it "hooks" people's interest, and they can click through the hyperlinks to the rest of the site (in English). Of course, you will lose some people who don't read English, but this method at least lets you open an online presence in other countries.
- index registrations. Of course, it is imperative, once your site is live in these languages, to have it registered in some 30 indexes per language (not including English, where it is quite affordable to register at 100 or 200 indexes). I'd recommend 30 indexes per major language. For minor languages, 10-15 indexes per language would be sufficient.
Remember that you can also attract more traffic to your site by optimizing pages for certain search engines, according to what keywords you think people will ask for, to get to your site. You can have pages optimized in a dozen languages, either for the top multilingual search engines (Altavista, Lycos, Infoseek, etc.), or for the top local country search engines.
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press releases. People read about new Web sites in printed publications or online, and it is quite useful to drive traffic to your site.
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online promotion. Marketers can post to the local Newsgroups and forums in each country to discuss your Web site and its merits. They can also make strategic links in other Websites in each country chosen that lead back to your site.
- banner ads in each country where these languages are spoken. And remember to translate the banner and link the banner to a page in the target language.
W.M.T.: What can a small company do if they promote their webiste worldwide and they receive e-mails in different languages?
Translations can be expensive (250-350 LIT per word), so it is good to have other ways of understanding emails in other languages. Machine translation isn't perfect, but it's good for basic communicating. If I don't understand an email, I pass it through the free translation at Babelfish. You can also buy translation software, such as Systran. Once you have someone who has seen your Website in their language, they might write you to ask a question (not many people are comfortable writing English, if they live outside the 7 English countries). Your answer doesn't have to be perfect in their language, since the reason for writing is to communicate -- that's different than marketing (where a perfect image means everything).
W.M.T.: Italian small and medium companies are very dynamic and are quite interested in the topic of electronic commerce. Can you tell us what are the most important trends in the next months? (because it is impossible to speak about years).
A. The explosion in this market will be after the Y2K problem is past, and companies have digested the euro into their accounting systems. There is lots of pent-up demand. But before next 1 January, there is so much to do to prepare our computer systems for the next millenium, that there is no attention given to online marketing or international marketing until after this crisis is over.
Another trend: informediaries. Fortune Magazine recently published an article about the explosion of ecommerce, and pointed to the birth of "infomediaries": online exchanges that link buyers and sellers by efficiently distributing market information. Within a few years, they say that at least half of all business-to-business online trade will flow through such exchanges.
W.M.T.: To close this interview, our readers are expecting to find in WMT some useful suggestion and we want satisfy them, could you suggest us some intereting free resources to promote a website?
Once you have a lead gateway page in a language, you can register it for free in many of the indexes and search engines in that language at the following sites:
English -- www.submit-it.com
German -- www.dmarkt.com/fritz/ or www.netfit.com/webpromotion/index.shtml
French -- www.wakatepe.com/submitnow/
or www.dmarkt.com/fr/
You can also put your banner on other sites at "banner exchanges" in other countries -- you will find a long list of international banner exchanges at www.markwelch.com. The most international one is Hyperbanner, an Israli company that offers a banner exchange in most every language.
February, 1999
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