Introduction: Using multi-lingual Google Adwords for international export sales and market research

Successful marketing managers are measured more by the quality and number of quality sales leads they generate than the soft fuzzy brand image stuff that hard nosed businesses deplore.

Smart marketing managers make sure they work for companies with compelling value propositions, rather than those who have little more than “the brand” going for them. This article is aimed at successful companies that are achieving good results using best practice with a low cost per quality sales lead.

As the title of the article suggests, and Google’s explosive revenue growth proves, it’s highly likely that any successful company will have at least experimented with Google Adwords. If your company is currently spending more than a million Euros a year on conventional marketing (conventional adverts, direct mail/telesales, trade fairs, and events) and has never spent anything on Google Adwords then something is almost certainly wrong.

Even a few thousand well spent Euros/Pounds/Dollars on Adwords can generate better results than conventional marketing. This article is more aimed at readers who find this statement obvious rather than those who have yet to learn/understand. If you don’t understand and you want to keep your job, stop reading this article and learn about Adwords now.

Let’s take a fictional but potentially realistic case study (could this be you?)

You are a successful marketing manager. The company you work for defines the key goal of your department as “the number of high quality sales leads you generate for the sales team”. You generate leads, they sell.

Suppose you spent GBP/Euro/ US$/ 20-50K on Adwords in 2010 and its been highly successful. The cost per high quality qualified lead was less than 40 Euros, and the sales team regard you as something of a hero. Senior management hasn’t quite “got it” yet, and still like to go to expensive trade fairs, splurge on conference sponsorships, but you’ve been redirecting budget to on line and have cut Trade Press advertising completely. Your spend at Google is increasing. However all the planned Google Adwords advertising has been done in English, and you know that this isn’t smart. The multi lingual Adwords pilot was a fiasco (more on this later).

As a result of the global economic downturn, new international markets have been given a higher priority. The CEO and other main board directors, have been asking questions about countries in which the company doesn’t have a good position, and results are expected. The sales team expect you do help them in the same way you have in your traditional English language markets.

The familiar problem is people and resources. There are fewer people than a couple of years ago. The current view is that the existing team has to “try harder” meaning “put in more hours”. It's only when a group of countries gets in enough revenue that a dedicated person is appointed (and that is always in sales not marketing).

Senior management is aware of the “chicken and egg” problem, but will not create new positions in marketing without a guarantee of a return. While they understand is that is impossible to visit all countries, they expect prioritization. Anyone who finds a solution can look forward to rapid advancement. The challenge is to know how to prioritize and how to spend scarce resources well.

Your in-house know how about Google Adwords is better than some consultants. You know what it means to have “content network” turned off, to reduce the low value click throughs. Competitor activity is being analysed with "site-related keywords” in the keyword suggestion tool and with www.spyfu.com.

You have robust rapid site development so that well designed keyword rich landing pages for your campaigns can go up within 48 hours. If your in house team are too busy (sounds familiar?) you have approved outsourced web developers who are quick, cheap and reliable. You are using exact matches and using Google Analytics Conversion Code to track the results. In English on line marketing, you are ahead of the game. The situation in foreign languages is however far from satisfactory.

As a result of brainstorming and common sense, the idea of Adwords advertising in languages other than English has been considered and an unsatisfactory pilot has taken place The most successful keywords in English were translated, and keywords bought in French, Italian, German and Spanish. Most were surprisingly cheap usually except for some German keywords which were astonishingly expensive, suggesting that someone valued them very highly indeed.

As a result of inadequate budgeting there we no dedicated localized landing pages in the language of the key words so to start with clicks were directed to the correct bit of “about us” on the corporate web site which was in German, French, Italian, Spanish and Japanese. This produced reasonable traffic but a high “bounce rate” where visitors arrived and left almost immediately. Visitors arrived expecting to see information about latest products but soon discovered that the web site did not provide the product information they were looking for in the right language.

Dramatic and stressful situations arose in the headquarters where Italian and German speakers started calling up and finding that no one was available to talk to them. Marketing was made to feel stupid. Surely it was predictable that Adwords in Italian might lead to Italians calling up.

The second phase of the pilot was to direct the clicks to distributors’ web pages and country offices.
The distributors had no idea that their leads were arriving thanks to global marketing, but were of course appreciative. A retrospective survey revealed that there was some increase in the number of leads coming off distributor web sites, but as distributor offers and promotions never matched exactly what was going on in the wholly owned subsidiaries, integration was hard.

The country offices were not set up to deal with sales leads generated in this fashion. Traditionally minded sales reps did not have the skills to properly and quickly qualify the leads, and some bad feeling was generated as sales managers grumbled about the fact that students and competitors were “wasting” advertising money on by clicking, And marketing felt their efforts were not being properly followed up on.

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