A Starter Guide to Digital Marketing for Growing Export Sales

Congratulations! If you’re reading this post, you’re either already an exporter, or you’re exploring its possibilities for growing your revenue. That puts you at the top of the class of businesses – come collect your gold star.

A lot goes into exporting – compliance, logistics, operations, legal…. But none of that matters if you don’t drive demand for your products or services.*

There are no more cost-effective ways to drive that demand than digital marketing. So let’s dig into the basics of what you need to know to explore if digital marketing can help your export efforts and how you can get started.

Always Start with Your Goals

Marketing exists solely to help you grow revenue. There may be intermediary steps along the way, but making the cash register ring is always the goal.

Sometimes when it comes to digital marketing, though, businesses lose sight of that and say they want to increase likes or followers. While that engagement is good, we haven’t found a bank in any country that allows you to cash a thumbs-up emoji.

Goals: What Do You Actually Want to Achieve?

So before you start laying out your strategy, choosing marketing tactics, or writing copy, get clarity on what success looks like for your business.

Most exporters fall into one or more of these buckets:

Demand Generation

This is lead gen, plain and simple. You want people to raise their hands – whether potential end users, partners, distributors, or resellers. That means giving them a reason to click on your ad / posting / website, visit your site, and contact you.

Remember: you have to provide something of value and display credibility for anyone to want to fill out a form, call you, or enter a live chat.

Ecommerce Sales

If you can sell directly online to clients overseas, great. That could be via your own site, a regional marketplace, or a combination of the two. In this case, your return on investment is easier to track – did you get a sale or not, and what is the return on your investment.

With ecommerce sales (and some other goals), you’ll want to understand how much you prioritize efficiency (e.g. how inexpensively you can acquire a sale) vs. scale (how can you maximize revenue). Both are important…and both are at odds with one another.

Market Awareness

Sometimes you just need to get your name out there. Maybe you’re building up a pipeline in a new market or have a product with a long buying cycle. In these cases, you’ll still obviously want to measure success.

The KPIs will just look different than doing a direct measure of a sale or lead – think things like ad impressions, video views, or return traffic to your website.

Tactics: What Should You Do First?

The tools you choose depend on your goals, your budget, and where your audience hangs out. Let’s start with the tactics our clients have had the most success with in their exporting campaigns.

Google Ads

Search campaigns are the bread and butter for immediate intent. You’re reaching people looking specifically for the products and services you offer when they’re most interested.

Google also allows you to layer in different types of campaigns, such as ecommerce (Performance Max and Shopping), YouTube (video), and various Display campaigns (banner ads throughout the web) that heavily leverage Google’s machine learning.

Google has tailor-made its solutions for exporters as you can target specific languages, as well as geographies from country down to the city/neighborhood level.

(We’re talking about Google here as it has the highest market share, but all the major global search engines offer similar forms of advertising – including Yandex, Baidu, and Naver. In some cases, you can also get coverage on those engines or their local competitors through Google Ads campaigns.)

Google Ads offers a great solution for testing, as well as for quick wins. Like any ads, though, their value disappears when you turn them off. So there isn’t much residual benefit unless you continue to invest.

LinkedIn

For B2B businesses, LinkedIn can be a goldmine. Its primary benefit is you know you’re reaching the right person at the right company. You can target by a variety of professional attributes, including job title, skills, seniority, industry, and company size. You can also target by geography, although not as granularly as Google.

Keep in mind that the people you’re reaching aren’t necessarily in the market for your services or products right now. You’ll need to create a compelling offer for them to be willing to raise their hand – and you’ll need to have a great follow up campaign once you do get their contact information.

Marketplaces: Mercado Libre, Amazon, etc.

If you’re selling products directly to consumers, marketplaces can provide great opportunity. They have large built-in audiences and have created frictionless buying systems that maximize sales on their platforms. Marketplaces also shorten your learning curve on logistics and payments.

You’re already familiar with Amazon and eBay; other major players like Alibaba and Mercado Libre exist. Definitely check out Mercado Libre if LatAm is a major market or one you want to explore.

Just as marketplaces have a ton of benefits, there can be drawbacks. You may not know the consumer, they may have very stringent procedures to follow, and the prices they charge can take a giant bite out of your budget. Before jumping into a marketplace, be sure to understand these potential downsides for the platform as well as for the particular market as they often vary country to country.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

SEO is the counterpart to Google Ads. It’s how you make search engines (and, now, AI tools like ChatGPT) share your content on relevant searches for free.

Think of SEO as your long game as results typically take 6 months or even longer to have meaningful impact. But once you start driving traffic and leads or sales, its faucet stays on.

SEO is a very strong approach once you’ve already identified important markets for your products or services and that there’s buying interest there.

Keep in mind that targeting regions requires extra work on your website, including translating content and (potentially) having separate folders, subdomains, or versions of your site made specifically for an individual region. Many companies will build an ‘MVP’ version of their website with just the most important buying consideration pages for that audience.

Market Opportunity: Where Should You Go?

Not every market is worth your time. Start with data. Here are some free and low-cost resources to get you started.

U.S. Commercial Service

The Commercial Service has a variety of ways they can help you identify market potential. Here are 3 of our favorites:

1. Trade Mission Analysis. The Commercial Service manages several trade missions throughout the year, such as their signature Trade Winds event.

When you apply for these events, you share which country or countries from the agenda that you have an interest in and provide detailed information about your exporting goals and background.

In-county Commercial Service Officers then perform an analysis to let you know how strong your opportunities look in each market.

2. Gold Key Service. The Gold Key is an incredibly powerful and flexible service you can purchase from the Commercial Service – and they make it really affordable for small and medium-sized businesses.

As an example, we’ve used Gold Keys in multiple countries to identify and arrange meetings with potential clients. They’ll help with all the logistics from transportation to translation.

We even used a Gold Key once to set up and promote a speaking engagement for us, which led to a packed house in San José, Costa Rica.

3. Market Diversification Tool. The International Trade Administration built this free tool that analyzes your current export markets and suggests others with similar profiles based on the specific products you sell.

This is probably ITA’s best-kept secret, but cat’s out of the bag now. Check it out here: https://beta.trade.gov/MarketDiversificationTool

Google Ads

Google gives you detailed information about market demand. Here are our 2 favorite resources:

1. Keyword Planner. You can create a Google Ads account for free. You’ll need to enter in a credit card, but you don’t have to actually run any campaigns.

Once you do that, you’ll get access to a variety of tools including their Performance Planner and Reach Planner. The best one to start with is their Keyword Planner.

Here you can either enter in keyword ideas related to what you sell and they’ll give you information about how often people are searching for those phrases. You can also just enter your website or a competitor’s and Google will give you ideas. Using a competitor website is handy especially if you don’t have a translated version of your site yet.

See data by country or even state/province/department.

2. Market Explorer. We’re proud to be a Premier Google Partner and strategic partner in their International Growth Agency Program (IGAP) – something available to less than 1% of all U.S. partners.

Through our IGAP partnership, Google provides a variety of advanced tools and trainings. One of our favorite market research tools is their Market Explorer.

This tool is kind of a cross between Google’s Keyword Planner and ITA’s Market Diversification tools. We can choose from a fairly large variety of categories (everything from kayaks to __) to get a list of the top markets for that category. The information includes factors like market interest, GDP per capita, and how interest is growing over time.

Since you don’t have access to this tool directly yourself, you can work with an IGAP partner like DOM to identify and compare your top markets.

Other Demand Hacks

But wait…there’s more. Check out some more free tools and hacks to gauge interest in your services or products in different markets:

1. Amazon. Amazon’s backend gives insights into product-level demand by country. Their Global Selling program and Brand Analytics dashboards offer directional data that helps prioritize which countries show traction.

Not selling on Amazon yet? No problem. Go to the country-specific version of Amazon that you’re interested in (e.g. amazon.co.jp for Japan). Type in the products you’re selling into the search bar and you can see what your competition looks like. You can get an idea of their popularity based on how many were ordered in the last month and number of reviews, especially on verified purchases.

You can repeat this type of research for other marketplaces, such as Mercado Libre for any country in Latin America.

2. LinkedIn. Similar to Google Ads, you can create an advertising account on LinkedIn for your business. Once completed, create a campaign (which you never have to run).

Put in your target geography and all the professional characteristics of the people you’re trying to reach – industry, company size, job titles, etc. LinkedIn will let you know how many people you can expect to reach.

LinkedIn’s effectiveness – like that of other social networks – will be highly dependent on adoption in your target market.

3. Meta. Just like with LinkedIn, you can create a business account and set up a dummy campaign to get audience data.

The difference with Meta is that instead of being focused on professional data, here you’ll segment based on other demographics and interests. Think of Facebook and Instagram as the B2C counterpart to LinkedIn (although in some markets, Facebook may make sense as a B2B play as well).

Next Steps: Where Do You Go from Here?

You don’t have to figure all this out on your own.

Contact the U.S. Commercial Service

The Commercial Service offers in-market expertise, trade counseling, matchmaking, and much, much more. Many exporters don’t realize just how much free or low-cost support they can access through these trade professionals.

Plus, the Commercial Service likely offers the best return on investment of any government agency – returning $460 for every $1 of taxpayer dollars used, according to the latest fiscal year report.

I’m a big proponent of them, not just because I’ve seen the great work they do for exporters, but because DOM has benefited firsthand. We’ve used their Gold Key Service, trade missions, and many other services to grow our exports. They’ve secured meetings for us that we would never have been able to get – meetings that led to sales in new markets.

To find your friendly neighborhood Spider Commercial Service Officer, head over here.

Book a Free Export Marketing Audit

Our digital marketing agency has helped U.S. exporters reach new buyers in 150 countries around the world. And we’re exporters, too – having worked with companies in 27 different countries (and counting) on every populated continent. So we know exactly what you’re trying to accomplish.

In addition, we have a mandate to help U.S. businesses grow their exports as a Strategic Partner of the International Trade Administration.

To that end, we’re offering a free Export Marketing Audit and Global Visibility Report to all U.S. exporters – and those that are export-curious.

If you want to see how you stack up in a particular market and get a gauge for your opportunity, schedule your review and strategy session now.

Final Thoughts

Digital marketing can drive serious export growth when done with the right strategy and execution. Start with the basics: clear goals, appropriate channels, and a data-informed approach to market selection. Then layer in deeper tactics and optimization.

There’s no shortage of opportunity out there. The key is choosing where to focus.

Happy – and successful – exporting!

*While most people think of cargo containers full of products when they think exporting, service providers can and do export, too! Our agency has helped companies in dozens of industries across every populated continent.**

**If you know any penguins who could use some digital marketing, please send them our way!