In the last couple of years the focus of online marketing has shifted from purely English language based campaigns to more targeted multilingual and multicultural approaches. The focus of this post will be on the opportunities of three regions which have great potential for online marketing.

Yandex vs. Google in Russia

The online market in Russia is one of the most important growing markets that advertisers will have to monitor in the coming years. Especially online advertising has become more and more important. According to WebProNews.com, Russian online ad spend currently is estimated at 16 per cent and is still growing steadily.[1]

In line with these results, Yandex, the most popular search engine in Russia, experienced60 per cent sales growth in 2011. Owning about 60 per cent market share and rated the most popular web site on the Russian web, Yandex is currently aiming to increase its global index.[2]

Google managed to claim approximately 25 per cent of the market share as of May 2011 but has not kept up with Yandex’s growing market share just now.[3] Russia is one of the promising future markets for online marketing activities, especially in social media which plays an important role for Internet users. Going into this market requires thorough monitoring of the potential users, the search engines and the potential market niches.

Investing in China

Another interesting and fast growing online environment is China. According to Mashableecommerce will be one of the fastest growing areas in China in the next three years. This makes the Chinese Internet a very profitable place for investment.

In the Chinese web Baidu is the biggest search engine, indexing around 740 million pages. But it is not alone in the very competitive Chinese search engine market.[4] New competition comes from Jike, a government-owned search engine. It is already clear that a lot of content won’t be indexed by Jike as governmental-imposed censorship is in place and has a tight grip around users’ online experience.

Google has just recently announced that it will inform users if sites have been censored by the government. The censorship represents a huge challenge for Internet marketers to identify the right search queries and keywords for brands.

But China also offers a sizable opportunity for online marketers to reach the masses. According to the CNNIC (China Internet Network Information Centre) online marketers can potentially reach 420 million people online (31.6 per cent of the population in 2010).[5]Entering the Chinese online market requires the understanding of how people search; the culture and certainly the language.

The Middle East shows major online marketing growth  

The opportunities in the Middle Eastern online market are immense. The population of the Middle East is estimated at around 216 million people, and of these, about 77 million are frequent Internet users.

The massive growth of digital advertising is certainly a significant opportunity. A 50 per cent increase has been forecasted for 2012 which is just the beginning. In the coming years the digital market will grow and grow. The downside of this rapid growth is the lack of audience measurement systems but this will surely improve in due course.

Online marketers face challenges alongside opportunities. The economic and political situations, cultural circumstances as well as other factors have a major influence on the structuring of online marketing campaigns.

The potential of these three online markets is significant. Entering them requires a thorough understanding of the culture, the people, and the language and in more detailed terms, how people search.

Footnotes

1. Russian Web Ad Spending Overtakes Print
2. Yandex keeps pace with Google and Bing
3. Market shares of Google and Yandex compared
4. Baidu
5. China Internet Network Information Centre

Sabrina

Sabrina Hackenbracht is an online marketing executive based in our Edinburgh office. Originally from a tiny village in mid-west Germany, she came to Scotland, her “second most-loved place in the world”, in 2009.

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There’s no denying Bill Slawski is a bit difficult to understand. It doesn’t mean he’s not interesting and well worth the read if you can wade through it. So, to save you some time, I’ve summarised a few of his comments about web blocks and linguistic features.

Slawski writes about how a page can be broken down into segments such as the main content, header, footer, advertising, navigation, etc. Each of these blocks can be considered as “separate semantic units” that can be connected or standalone in relation to the page topic (they can also be physically connected or broken up into smaller segments).

In a patent filed on behalf of Microsoft in 2003, this analysis is described as an “…independent approach to detect content structure. It simulates how a user understands web layout structure based on his visual perception (emphasis mine).” If you think about how you read web pages (in a kind of zig-zag pattern, amiright?), the segmentation approach is not far off.

As a writer, I’m interested in the way content is structured and that includes the selection and placement of words and links. We already know that links in the middle of the page have more weight than those in footers, but what I didn’t know was that a search engine might actually assign PageRank for individual segments.

For example (according to the patent), a section of page with hyperlinked, capitalised words in short phrases, which appear in the sidebar or at the top of the page, indicates the main navigation. It sounds like common sense, but understanding how a search engine sees a page is really essential to SEO. These basic linguistic features – i.e. syntax and punctuation – are the means by which search engines are classifying and indexing pages.

*Puctuation Owl is impressed with your new-found wisdom:

So, if you write content for the web, it’s important to keep in mind how a search engine might segment it, but also remember that this patent was filed in 2003. A similar patent from Google followed in 2004. In other words, search engines have been thinking about segmentation for nearly a decade, and they’re continuing to improve their understanding of page semantics all the time. Watch this space!

Caitlin Smythe

Caitlin is a Digital Copywriter responsible for producing content for a range of clients. Based in the Edinburgh office, Caitlin eschews all the “girly” projects in favour of cars, insurance, banking, property and travel, and writes at a speed of knots. Originally from South Africa, she began working in SEO in 2007. In her spare time she likes karate, parrots, red wine, combat films and poetry. Sometimes all at once.

Internet marketing isn’t all search engine algorithms, email lists and targeted on-page advertising. If you’ve taken much of a look into the subject recently you will no doubt have been overwhelmed by the amount of attention being paid to content marketing. This sudden increase in coverage of the subject underlines the importance of content in a changing digital marketing environment and highlights exactly why you should prioritise it in your online offering. Content marketing covers everything from the copy on a website, to podcasts, advertising videos and blogs, infographics and white papers, and everything in between. Each facet of this chameleonic marketing discipline can have a different effect on your business. Four of these effects are laid out below, as well as some examples of a piece of stellar content marketing that has fulfilled these objectives.

SEO

As a leader in SEO we’d be remiss not to mention the benefits that excellent content marketing can have for SEO: simply creating targeted, search engine friendly copy for your sales pages can be a huge boost to your website’s visibility, but there’s much more content can do for you. Dating websites such as OKCupid and Zoosk create dozens of inbound links to their websites by putting out well-timed infographics that relate to current events, including the Oscars and the Super Bowl, while Basecamp creator 37signal’s corporate blog drives a lot of traffic and links their way.

Exposure and Branding

Dollar Shave Club launched in April 2011, but noise around the start-up soon fizzled out. To drive interest, Mike Dubin, CEO of Dollar Shave Club, put together the following advert that cost a measly $4,500 to produce. The effects were staggering; Dollar Shave Club managed to net 5,000 subscribers on the video’s launch date, despite the website becoming unavailable for large swathes of the day as it struggled to cope with the additional traffic. That number is now in excess of 12,000, with the company’s social networks seeing a similar overnight boost. The success in both sales figures and brand recognition has drawn comparison with the hugely popular ‘Old Spice Guy’ adverts.

Community Building and Management 

There is no better example of what content marketing can do for your community than Lady Gaga. This megastar is more than just one of the most marketable celebrities on the planet, she’s also a social media powerhouse. With more than 20 million followers on Twitter and a billion views on Youtube, Lady Gaga has built her following up through creating engaging content for fans both old and new and also by engaging with fan created content. Gaga regularly reposts “fan art” created by her fans and creates her own content in response to input from her fans. By “giving the people what they want”, Gaga has built up a loyal and extremely responsive community.

Sales and Investment

At the beginning of February Tim Schafer, founder of Double Fine Productions and creator of some of the world’s most enduring and popular video games, launched a project through crowdfunding platform Kickstarter aimed at creating a new adventure game – a genre seen as commercially risky to most investors and publishers. Initially seeking to raise $400,000 over the course of a month to fund both the development of the game and a documentary detailing its creation, the project reached this goal in just nine hours thanks to Schafer’s cleverly crafted content marketing strategy that included videos and minigames, as well as the enthusiasm of fans. After 24 hours the fund had netted more than a million dollars and by the time the project closed on Tuesday the total had rocketed to three million dollars, making it the most successful Kickstarter project in history.

Amanda Porrelli

Amanda Porrelli is a Digital Copywriter at Caliber Interactive. Working out of Caliber’s Edinburgh office, Amanda writes for an array of clients from a diverse range of industries. Before joining Caliber she was a social media consultant and community management wunderkind and helped found one of Scotland’s first digital arts festivals. When she’s not feverishly writing copy, she is most likely to be found tweeting, playing video games and generally being absorbed into the digital media machine.

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