Promote your Business in Italy
Market your Business in Italy
Italy has a population of around 60 millions (of which 38 millions Internet users), but Italians worldwide appear to be around 140 millions! If we consider the “Languages used on the Internet” wikipedia page Italian is the 11th language used in websites. Let’s have a little fun doing some math! If we consider reliable all these data we can find on the internet we have:
- 650 millions of websites in the world;
- 55% of these websites are in English; it gives us 357.5 millions English websites;
- 1.5% of these websites are in Italian; it gives us 9.75 millions Italian websites;
- with 565 millions of English users we have 63 websites every 100 English users;
- with 38 millions of Italian users we have 25 websites every 100 Italian users.
So – if all these data are reliable – even if the Italian market is not even a tenth of the English market the competition in Italy is much less competitive than what you are probably used to in the English market! So… the Italian market is an opportunity! It’s a very nice niche! But of course if you want to try to market your company in Italy you need someone able to do things in a proper way… which, of course, would be me! So, let’s see how is the best way to explore this opportunity for your business…
Publish an Italian website
First of all you need to have an Italian website (I know, it seems obvious, but you won’t believe what clients ask me sometimes). In some cases you may be able to explore the “Italian opportunity” just with a facebook page, a social media account or some other free resource on the internet. But for what it costs and in order to explore the niche properly you better have a website or at least a landing page. If you have already a website in English or in another language it won’t be too costly to have it translated or at least to have the main pages translated. But at this stage you better rely on someone who would take care that your content will be translated not literally, not sloppy, but targeted to the audience it is supposed to address (in this case “Italians” but also which demographic target) and preserving the real intentions of the communication (sell a product, have users get into an action, have them contact you…)
Promote your website
Once your website is ready is time to promote it. You can use a variety of methods and techniques to promote your website or, even better, a balanced combination of whatever makes sense:
- PPC (AdWords)
- SEO
- Content Implementation or Content Marketing
- Social Media Marketing
- …
As you may know PPC (being AdWords or another PPC program or even Facebook Ads targeting you website) will get you instant results even if they may be quite costly (generally speaking it depends on competition). Other techniques are usually much more cost-effective but they require time, actually they require much more time now, after all the Google algorithm updates, than they used to do a couple of years ago and that’s quite a bummer: often I have to tell new prospectives that they can’t expect results earlier than a few months for their campaigns and if they haven’t worked with me before, it is a quite a leap of faith they have to put in me. Also, now that we are in the “Not Provided” age (meaning that now the majority of the visits coming from Google we don’t know any more what keywords they searched) we have our challenges in getting useful insights from the Web Analytics of a website:
- which keywords are driving more visits?
- which keywords are giving us more profit?
- which keywords (content) we need to improve?
Today the answers to these questions might be quite a guess work, unless… you are not testing keywords with an AdWords campaign for example… But most of the time it is clear what needs to be done. Generally speaking the best approach is always a combination of methods, techniques and strategies that needs to tested and measured in the best way we can. The process might always describe as:
- Planning (example: find a list of keywords we want to rank for)
- Action (example: publish a list of pages with great content targeting the keywords in our list)
- Measurement (example: check the average ranking of the keywords, measure the traffic for the landing pages, measure the conversions…)
After the third step (the measurement) you should get enough insights to go back to step 1 and start the process over in order to grow your business even more (sounds cool, right?) A good rule of thumbs to promote a website is considering always a balanced combination of…
- excellent content;
- off-site promotion;
- social signals.
For what concerns “excellent content” depending on the plan, your resources and your budget you might want explore different strategy such as :
- developing a corporate blog;
- publishing a guide, a doc, a video or some other content to market (content marketing);
- implementing new pages on your website (examples: FAQ, How To pages, Q&A, landing page, Testimonials…);
- …
Off-site promotion is meant to get people to know about your website, being that PPC, Guest Blogging, Articles on other website, Web advertising… Whereas social signals are about promoting your reputation in the social networks (and possibly get also some leads). This is pretty much the path for the online success which is valid in Italy as per any other country. But if you want to explore the Italian market you should rely on someone – a native speaker – able to do that (which, again, it would be me!)