Digital business models & Internationalization – hand in hand on the triumphal march.

An apparently unstoppable development in the context of Corona: The internationalization and digitalization of trade (B2B and B2C)

 

We are currently living in a world, that is dependent on rapid digitalization and companies, that find it difficult to digitalize and transform business models and organizations will have an even harder time in the future.

Because: The digitalized competition never sleeps

Physical or digital products as well as service and their global digital marketing will gain enormous importance.

 

DI (Danish Industry) reported in 2021, that investigations have shown, that companies driving E-Commerce and E-Export can increase income by 216% per employee. This is a huge potential – for any enterprise in Denmark; no matter what size.

Developing sales markets with new customers, securing strategic competitiveness, less dependence on the local market – the opportunities for internationalization are huge.

And digitalization & digital transformation form the basis for selling products, services and solutions on the international stage (for both B2B and B2C).

When companies address to me, because they have an ambition to internationalize, then of course I encourage them to also look into the digital possibilities enabling for example contactless commerce, as e.g.

• Geo-Targeting (without geo-location no visibility of your websites’ content in potential markets)
• Augmented Reality (virtual product experience)
• Machine Learning (costs for that kind of tools have decreased significantly and are thus becoming mass technologies)
• AI features (in particular for services and recommendations by a virtual agent)
• Robotics

etc.

And these technologies are also affordable for small and medium sized enterprises.

Important is only to take the business development perspective: what and where do I want to grow and how can I use digital tools to reach the targets.

“Think big – start small” is affordable for any company.

 

Let’s take an example: The website

Apparently a minor thing, but with enormous consequences: the website cannot be found in Google. Why? The geo-targeting is wrong.

More precisely: Google cannot clearly assign individual URLs to specific countries. The result: There is no good ranking, i.e. there is neither visibility nor traffic.

What does geo-targeting have to do with a successful internationalization and digitalization?

Without geo-targeting there is no visibility of the content of a website in potential sales markets.

Not even, if the relevant national language is used or directories are marked accordingly.

Google recommends using different URLs for each language version of a page instead of adjusting the language of the page via cookies or browser settings.

If you use different URLs for different languages, you can use the hreflang attribute to make it easier for Google to link the search results to the correct language version of a page and by that make the website visible in potential target markets.