We are very proud to be working with UK Trade & Investment as part of the Exporting is GREAT initiative.

Here are some of our top tips for exporting online…

Top tip No.1: Export by city

McKinsey & Company published their Global Cities of the future identifying the top 600 cities forecast to be the urban powerhouses by 2025. We used this insight to develop a plan with Bristol based Fleur of England, to export by city not by country. Targeting by city makes it easier to identify competitors, target audiences and key opinion leaders.

Top tip No.2: Understand your gives and gets

Many businesses in the UK simply list the products and services they provide. We flip these into gets, articulating what the customer is going to get as a direct result of doing business. This is hard to do in English but is essential when dealing with International customers browsing online using their mobile devices. Eat Sleep Doodle, who used this technique when developing their products for a new website and International roll out.

Top tip No.3: Use video, pictures and words efficiently

Create interesting product, service and news stories in video, picture and word format that can be found by search engines, watched or viewed on a mobile device and shared via social media. Snuggy Hoods use the creation of digitally efficient content in their export of products to Boston and Melbourne.

Top tip No. 4: Integrate your search, social media and content

Search is a game of questions and answers. Keyword research by-city enables you to understand what questions are being asked – and therefore what answers you need to provide on your website – better than your competitors.

Listening to mentions about your industry online allows you to understand the websites where conversations are taking place, the sentiment, topics of mentions and the key opinion leaders so you can engage efficiently on social media.

By creating your own stories, shared from your website, that entertain or educate you ensure your content is shared organically, as opposed to having to pay for distribution.

Professional start-up Secret Saviours, have used these principles since launching in February 2015

Top tip No.5: The Killer Key Performance Indicators

We report 4 metrics; cost per acquisition of a new customer, average order value, customer lifetime value and website conversion percentage.

Cost Per Acquisition is the cost of labour, production and media distribution divided by the number of new customers acquired in a time period.

Average Order Value is online revenue divided by the number of sales.

Customer Lifetime Value is the cumulative value of a customer over time (initially we use the number of customers buying again within a time period)

Conversion of your website traffic of either qualified leads or sales. When entering a new export market we increase the Cost Per Acquisition up to 20% of Average Order Value for a 3-month launch period, reduced thereafter.

The Engagement ratio equals the total number of comments, likes and shares divided by the number of posts multiplied by 100% divided by the number of fans.

Return on investment / advertising spend is the ratio of from investment of marketing / advertising (only) spend versus the revenue return.

Finally, be careful and confident, you are a much better business than you would imagine.

Download our free 8-step plan and write your Online Export Business Plan.

Actionable Insight

Based in Bath and London, Actionable Insight is a boutique digital consultancy that works with businesses who want to be more successful online, both in the UK and in export markets.

Roger Jones

Roger Jones is a Digital Business Strategist and founder of Actionable Insight. Roger understands that developing an effective digital strategy is a combination of asking intelligent questions, paying careful attention to the answers and harnessing the power of data to create new angles of thinking. He then works closely with the key people in the business to create the “Go-To-Market Plan”.