Alex Baar | International Digital Marketing | E-commerce

Ah holiday again, finally time again for reading a lot about ecommerce, digital experience marketing and videomarketing! This time a blog post from Bangkok Don Muang airport where I am awaiting my for my AirAsia flight to Kunming, China. Waiting for my flight Yes, video's! I already liked making video's when I was age 6 or something, I can even remember making and editing video's with our Sony Handicam Video, one of the first videocamera's made for home usage. Nowadays video is very important in your (content) marketing strategy. Video is growing rapidly and there are many reasons why videos can be useful for your brand. A few reasons why video is so important: Video can boost your conversion and sales, directly but also indirectly. Video builds trust, and trust is only getting more important. Advertising alone will not give you the succes you need. In fact advertising is changing rapidly to less and higher quality. Video will help you rank better i...

Today, I am in the mood for writing something. Just a quick blog post today about international e-business. A few things to take into account when practicing international e-commerce. Email marketing E-mail marketing is an excellent channel to use for generating traffic to your website. A lot of people often forget about "deliverability". Deliverability means the percentage of the e-mails you sent out, that arrives at the subscribers. I won't go into details now. But if you go abroad with your email marketing campaigns, make sure you focus at deliverability. If your  e-mail does not arrive at many people of your database, you lose a lot of money! Make sure your e-mail service provider can help you with e-mail deliverability in the countries you are active. Affiliate marketing Affiliate marketing can be a good alternative source for traffic and sales. At this moment there are no global affiliate marketing agency's. Note that the affiliate marketing maturenes...

Below the presentation, I gave at the Dutch Export event 2013. The topic was international online marketing and the differences between countries and how to setup an international digital online strategy. Thank you Fenedex for organising this very interesting day! Dutch Version: Presentatie nationaal export_event_internationale_online_strategie from Alex Baar English version:

Some (international) internet and e-commerce news from the past week, including some reports and a social media monitoring checklist. Tripadvisor and Belgium hotels Belgium hotel owners hate customers The Belgium hotel federation wants to limit tripadvisor reviews. This is the other way around. Partly there is something to say about their criticism. But why don't they see the chances and opportunities the reviews can bring them? Be creative. Make sure your guests write at Tripadvisor, sent out after stay email marketing communication to remind all the guests to leave reviews, print out the reviews and put them in a guestbook at the lobby. People who are satisfied will react and negative reviews will be less in this case. But above all, make your guests feel comfortable and happy. Webinar IBM has an interesting webinar (recorded) about the changing consumer behavior. It is in English (landing page in Dutch) Social media monitoring checklist I created a social medi...

The worlds best airports in 2011 are (according to this website) the ones described below. I decided to take the first 3 and Schiphol, this saturdaymorning, to do a short quick review. I took Schiphol because I am Dutch and I visit the airport a lot. That's the only reason. I think they can improve also a lot in their online and multichannel communication. Airports are nice, they are always busy, you can do a lot in multi channel communication to optimize the user experience and a lot is written about airports at the web. So by listening to the visitors of your airport you can optimize your services and give the best possible airport experience to the visitors. Unfortunately not all of the best airports in the world have a good digital communications strategy. This is the list of world's best airports in 2011: 1) Hong Kong International Airport 2) Singapore Changi Airport 3) Incheon International Airport 4) Munich Airport 5) Beijing Capital International Airport 6) ...

Cultural differences in international social media Cultural differences in international social media: Mixi (JP) - Facebook (US) I like to research and experience cultural differences in digital marketing in general. This time let's take a closer look at cultural differences in social media. There are not only linguistic differences, otherwise you could simply translate everything, but there are also differences in behavior. So if you are a global player and you have a brand communication manual or a social guide, be aware there might be local differences necessary. Especially in social media, where there is direct contact with fans, customers and their friends, it is so important to communicate the right thing and to understand your audience so you can take the right conclusions. Global social media behavior A while ago, I saw a presentation by Fons Trompenaars  and in his presentation he described some real nice cases of different reactions in the world at the ...

Weibo, many people in western Europe or the USA, don't know what Weibo is, but in China, Sina Weibo is really big. Sina Weibo receives 1 in every 100 visits in China! If I say: "weibo is a Twitter +", probably you will get an idea. I started to do some desk research to learn about Weibo. Interesting for myself,  to learn about what Weibo is, why Weibo got so big and what can be learned from the services and features they offer and of course it is always interesting to look at cultural differences in (online) marketing. This article is based on desk research and I will add many links in the article. Sina.com is an online media company in China. Sina owns Weibo. Weibo is often described as a hybrid form between twitter and facebook. Details about Sina can be found at Wikipedia . Why did Sina Weibo became so big? Sam Flemming and Eugene Chew explain why Sina became so big in this  interesting video. An important reason is that they are very good at ...

Airports and Airlines have so many contactmoments that they still not use. Booking confirmations is one example..It would be great to work on that, and to know that you please people with information and help the airline with additional customer information.. This is a booking confirmation from Cathay Pacific. One that I received after flying to Hong Kong last summer. I still do not understand why airlines make this booking confirmation not more fun. Add value to it, create new contact moments. Do something more then just the flight details. It is so boring. So many chances. Most airlines have boring booking confirmations by the way. Itinerary Example CX The e-mail itself is probably one of the best read and opened e-mails ever. Ask people if it is a leisure or business flight and use targeted relevant content to get contact moments. Of course the booking process at the website must be as easy as possible, but after the booking is finished so many chances! Social shari...

It is nice to watch trends and to extrapolate that to other branches or just to get inspiration. Good to see that almost every trend can be combined with social media. This once again shows the importance of social media. Trendhunter's annual trend video is always nice to watch: Some highlights of their video: Digital eating Trend to order via ipads or digital devices build in tables or other digital devices that make into restaurants. Related idea's: Custom build apps to order, to get details from people who order in your restaurant, so you can do follow up communication and stay engaged with your customers. Show them interactive offers while they are sitting at your tables. Cross and upsell while they sit. If they ordered something spicey, they probably like to have something to cool as well..if it is 30 degrees outside, show them an ice cream offer...etc. Add value by let people use internet at the table Let people sent messages to other tables (flirt tabl...

The social conference 2012 Last thursday, I was in the happy position to visit the social conference 2012. It was better then expected. Really a lot of international speakers and case study's. Exactly my interest. Only negative point, but there were (with so many online people) not enough free power plugs to charge devices. The day started with a presentation from Fons Trompenaars . I found this really interesting. Fons know a lot about trans cultural communication. He told a lot of things I recognized, but explained also with great humour a lot of things, I did not knew. But is was nice to hear the examples from Korea, Japan, Germany etc. All very recognizable, if I think back about my travels. I realized I have to learn a lot more quickly at this trans cultural area, so many interesting things, that can help build success in this global world. Luckily Fons gave a few tips for books to read on which : co-opetition  (others to be added) Fons Trompenaars kicki...