Tech marketers must act local

Multinational tech companies are forsaking the chance of connecting with customers using the web to search for solutions by not allowing local offices to control and produce their own web presences.

And large companies aren't the only ones forgetting the 'think global, act local' mantra. Australian tech companies are also missing the opportunity to sell internationally by not making modest investments in setting up country-specific web presences.

That's the opinion of Tom Petryshen, CEO of Amplify - an SEO and web development agency, whosE client list include Webjet, Europcar and Carlson Hotels. Petryshen, a former Olympic wrestler from Canada who moved to Australia a decade ago, said he is stunned that in all those years, he has yet to see a change in the way multinationals promote themselves internationally using the web.

"A lot of multinationals who have a presence in this market, still have everything controlled from some location outside of Australia. That whole centralised approach takes a lot of control away from local marketers - the people who are charged with getting to the right people in the right language," he said.

If local marketers don't have the ability to create their own content and produce their own sites, it will invariably cause their search engine rankings to suffer, which is costing them business, Petryshen added.

"When you get outside of just searching for brand names, these multinationals invariably can't be found and they're missing out on huge opportunities."

Petryshen cited IBM as an example. Its local website is nothing more than a token customisation of the central US site.

"That's a huge company that has gone through a lot of changes, so there is almost certainly a lot of people in Australia who won't have any idea of the services and products they now sell."

Australian companies should likewise not expect that one site in Australia should serve the rest of the world. Taking the time to get local domains on local servers with some degree of local content and optimisation, will make a massive difference to how you rank in international search results, Petryshen explained. These are steps that don't necessarily require a lot of money or resources, but would enable smaller companies to test a market and see if there is any interest before setting up distribution channels or local offices.

"Unless you're a company like Facebook, you can't try and blanket the internet with one or two websites. You have to look at having a voice in that market that speaks to the customer," Petryshen said.

The other big missed opportunity he saw by marketers, including those in the tech space, was not using landing pages in order to measure the success of offline campaigns.

"That's an area a lot of tech companies could do a better job of. Create landing pages for each of the trade mags you're using and do some integrated marketing, so you can see who might be reading what. It makes the message you're giving more consistent and at the end of the day, it's measurable, so I still don't understand why more companies haven't gotten on the bandwagon."