In cross border e-commerce, often the question is asked: "what can I centralise and what can I decentralise if I do cross border ecommerce"?
Cross border ecommerce wisdom
The question really depends at your strategy, your products or services, the size and structure of your company, your financial capabilities and of course the countries where you are active, or want to expand to.
There are nowadays companies who can fully fulfil every aspect of your cross border e-commerce activities,
Having said that, I have described per e-commerce channel, my view at localisation versus /decentralisation and how I think it is most effective.
To make it easy I introduce here the
Alex -localisation-centralisation -*- meter!
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Stars and Alex a good combination |
SEA (search engine advertising)
Search engine advertising, can be centralised, there are nowadays some really good global search engine agency's who really can help you with your international sea strategy and execution. Since a large part of SEA (like advertising description, product insertion, stock information) can be automated if you have a good product feed and ICT landscape it is easy to optimise via a central agency.
In terms of localisation/centralisation, I give this activity * localisation star and ***** centralisation stars.
SEO (search engine optimization)
There are two important aspects in SEO, technical SEO and content SEO.
Technical SEO is best to centralise. The reason is, that almost all search engines in the world, more or less require the same technical adjustments and often companies have one generic website system.
In terms of localisation/centralisation, I give this activity * localisation star and ***** centralisation stars.
Content SEO is a different story. Of course there are also agency's who say that they can deliver content SEO per country, but sometimes they just translate texts that in other countries might have important keywords, but in the country aimed at, might not so important. Besides that content SEO is also often, to be ahead of trends, to produce content that will be important in a few months time. Often this knowledge is only known by real local people, not by just translating.
Then there is of course the -not completely undisputed- linkbuilding activity where people pay others to get a link.
I personally am not so much in favour of this activity, I see more value in creating real valuable interactive content, that will be highly shared and linked to.
But if you do this paid linkbuilding activity, it is best done by locals.
In terms of localisation/centralisation, I give this activity *** localisation stars and **centralisation stars.
Social Media Advertising
Social Media Advertising, is just like SEA pretty easy to centralise, however the trend is more and more to adjust your advertisement to organic social behaviour or into geotargeting at for example local events. This makes social media advertising in my opinion still centralisable, but just a little bit less then SEA. Localisation/Centralisation **/***
In terms of localisation/centralisation, I give this activity ** localisation stars and *** centralisation stars.
Social Media Content production
The organic social media results, so the general posts we make, can in my opinion best be done as a hub and spoke model. Centralised but with local flavours. Social media needs to be authentic and there are many local interests that differ per country or even per region. It is advisable to centralise the social media tooling (including social media reporting tools), but to keep local access for local posts and local influencers.
Many cases are known where international companies use local influencers in their local social media strategy.
In terms of localisation/centralisation, I give this activity **** localisations star and *** centralisation stars.
Website Optimization
If one of your company's main activities is selling via your website, it is best to centralise all technical issues but when acquiring these tools or building these technical adjustments, keep in mind what local offices or agency's can do at your website.
Think about for example:
- Local access for A/B testing purposes, locals know much better how their customer group or target group is behaving and what their interests are.
- Local CMS access for writing content, in order to have more valuable content, faster.
- Local access for SEO purposes (adjusting product titles/meta description)
- Local access but with guidelines for image uploading
- Local payment methods
- Local checkout flows
- Etc.
Optimising a website for the highest conversion and traffic possible,
always involves local knowledge.
Also take in mind, that your template must be flexible. Many global company's have different templates for the different regions they service.
This is of course related to culture and user behaviour. You can still be one brand, even if you have different layouts in different country's or regions. Read more about that
here.
I will write more about website localisation in a future post, someday :)
In terms of localisation/centralisation, I give this activity **** localisation stars and ** centralisation stars.