Promoting your brand across borders can be challenging – especially without stores on the high street to provide a physical presence. Hardly surprising then, that many of our Top50 in the IREU Top500 Brand Engagement Performance Dimension are well-established retailers, both in their home countries and internationally.
1. How much are you Liked?
A retailer bragging about how many followers it has on Twitter or Likes on Facebook is all very well but does that number really suggest the retailer is doing well or not? The average number of Facebook Likes for our IREU500 retailers was just over 2.4m – so boasting that you have 1m or so Likes may not be a great recommendation. Retailers can boost Facebook scores by encouraging shoppers with good content, meaningful promotions or access to additional services.
2. Match media to the market
Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube may be regarded as de rigueur by many of our IREU500 retailers, while the leading players also add such networks as Instagram, Pinterest or Google+, as well as links to Apple Store and Google Play to collect their apps. Not all may be relevant for customers but retailers should be sure to include those customers are most likely to use. That can be challenging if a target market is at the younger end of the age spectrum, where preferences for what is cool and what is not can change suddenly and significantly. When moving to new geographies, it may also mean adding a raft of other networks: QZone, with 600 million users, may be vital for the Chinese market, for example. Some retailers also add links in their blogs to the list of social media icons on websites, but a presence on other micro-blogging sites could offer better brand engagement in some geographies, such as using Sina Weibo in China.
3. Make it easy and obvious
Accessing a site via Facebook rather than typing the website URL will be the preferred option for many, so it’s important to make it as quick and easy as possible to buy. Of the IREU500 retailers, a little more than half (57%) have a click-through to ‘shop now’ from Facebook. Use a message appropriate to your customer base to flag that the item is available to buy – as Boohoo.com puts it: “Shop ’em all here.” Even fewer (27%) make it easy for Facebook visitors to switch geographic region. In a global marketplace, a potential customer may well find a Facebook page in the brand’s home language. Making it obvious that they can switch to a more relevant national site could improve brand engagement rankings.
And that’s not all. To read the other eight approaches, read this piece, which first appeared in the IREU Top500 Brand Engagement Performance Dimension Report in full here. To browse the brand engagement report, click here.
