Google offers new tools to grow businesses globally

New tools to grow your business globally - Google Blog

Srinidhi Viswanatha from Global Advertisers team has posted a really interesting blog that has attracted my whole attention because it offers you to better understand Merton's Matthew effect, a particular explanation of the law of success!

Imagine you're a men's tailor in Bangkok, and you sell custom suits to travelers passing through Thailand. You start a website to sell your suits online and begin to notice that the majority of your website traffic comes from overseas. How do you respond to this international demand?

Businesses of all sizes face a number of obstacles when they want to expand internationally. First, they must identify the right market to sell their products or services, such as custom men's suits. Then they have to create versions of their website and ad campaigns in the language of the market they want to reach. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, they need to reach new customers who may be interested in their products and services.


Starting today, businesses can access a number of new resources from Google to help them overcome these obstacles and start growing internationally. We're launching a new website, calledGoogle Ads for Global Advertisers, which will serve as a central hub for Google's tools and tips for businesses looking to expand to foreign markets. This website pulls together resources for businesses to find the right market for their products and services, translate their websites and ad text, find new customers with relevant online ads, and understand options for international payment, shipping and customer service.


We're also introducing Global Market Finder, a new free tool to help businesses identify markets with high demand for their products or services. The Global Market Finder automatically translates your keyword—for example, [business suit]—into 56 languages and then uses Google search trends data to see where in the world people search for your product or service. It helps businesses evaluate new markets by showing the volume of local searches, estimated price for keywords and competition for each keyword in each market. With this tool, businesses can answer questions like "how competitive is this market?", "how does demand in one country compare to demand elsewhere in the world?" and "how much would it cost to start advertising in this new market?" You can read more about these new tools on the Inside AdWords blog.


Google has already helped hundreds of thousands of businesses reach customers in foreign markets. From a mosaic company in Lebanon to a bespoke shoe retailer in Sydney, a tech support company in India and a bed and breakfast in Poland, tools like AdWords have helped businesses reach new customers and drive traffic to their websites. We think our new website and tools will encourage even more businesses to expand internationally, whether you're a small business testing a single market for the first time or a mid-size company advertising your products to an entire region.

After all, there are more than 1.9 billion consumers online. Wouldn't you like to add some of them as customers?

For all micro-bloggers who are using twitter, Sponsored Tweets and MyLikes are great ad tools as well, I recommend to all of you!

Bankers You Can Believe In

I've found an interesting article, Bankers You Can Believe In, on The Huffington Post that attracted my attention, signed by Aron Cramer!

With their brethren parading to Capitol Hill to explain themselves and their industry to skeptical lawmakers and an angry public, three bankers at this week's CERES Conference in Boston may revive faith in a profession that is sorely in need of respect.

I had the privilege of chairing a plenary discussion of innovative financial solutions that, with a little luck, may create a path to low-carbon prosperity. These days, seeing the word "innovation" paired with "financial products" is a good way to clear the room (or spur a call to the Feds). But the three very different bankers on my panel are, in fact, pioneering new ways to invest in forest preservation, invent disruptive technologies needed for a clean energy system, and create a price on carbon.

Despite his elegant banker's suit, Abyd Karmali is somewhat of an accidental financier. After two decades consulting for private firms and the United Nations, Karmali was recruited two years ago (interesting timing) to head Bank of America's carbon markets division. His vision is to spread carbon pricing throughout BofA's products. As he points out, carbon trading will only do so much if we don't find ways to incorporate coverage of environmental improvements into all financial services. He proposes, for example, that banks use mortgages not only to help people pay off their houses, but also to encourage clean-energy investments that would otherwise require capital beyond the reach of most homeowners.

If Karmali is aiming to green today's economy, Macquarie Capital's Bill Green is trying to shape tomorrow's. His impatience with doom-and-gloom scenarios is exactly what you would expect from a Silicon Valley veteran who previously led investments in the solar power company Bright Source and Shai Agassi's electric car system for the venture capital powerhouse VantagePoint. Green's contrarian nature is best revealed by the kind words he had for Lehman Brothers, which he credited with providing financing for tax-equity deals that stoked clean-technology investments before the financial crisis hit in 2008. He sees this week's investment by Google in two North Dakota wind farms as evidence that Lehman's strategy was sound, and is poised to be revived.

But the most theatrical member of this trio was Australian Dorjee Sun, hailed by Time magazine as a "Hero of the Earth" in 2009. Sun has built a business, Carbon Conservation, by arranging financing to avoid deforestation across Asia. His efforts are credited with saving a sizeable amount of forest, which he's done by buttonholing forestry executives, smallholders in Borneo, and the president of Mongolia. Sun's vision - and humor - makes a potent combination.

These three clearly showed that innovation in the financial services sector is not always a dirty word. In fact, focused properly, it's exactly what we need if we are going to marry healthy financial returns with a healthy planet. With due respect to Lloyd Blankfein, Goldman Sachs may not be doing "God's work," but these three bankers can plausibly make that claim.

Do you think that bankers who are pioneering new ways to invest in forest preservation, invent disruptive technologies needed for a clean energy system, and create a price on carbon are contributing to help us make the world a better place?

Please feel free to comment and to discuss!

SwissNetInc | Promote Your Page Too

How to Integrate Paid Search and Social Media for Better Marketing Results

Matt Lawson is director of marketing for Marin Software, provider of the leading enterprise-class paid search management application for advertisers and agencies.


Paid search and social media are both extremely important marketing channels. But how can brands combine the two distinctly different tactics, the bid-based, conversion-obsessed, ROI-driven world of paid search and the experimental, brand-building, hard-to-measure world of social, to drive an overall increase in ROI? Marketers large and small are grappling with the challenge of how to integrate their paid search advertising programs with social media programs on networks like Facebook, Twitter, blogs, and viral video sites.

Social and Search Should Work Together

The most important thing to remember when starting a search-and-social integration program is that search and social each provide different benefits to your business, so you should leverage their strengths instead of trying to get them to deliver results that aren’t suited to the medium.

Marketers usually participate in social media to create an active dialogue with consumers around their products and services, with the main goal of building brand value, and a secondary goal of driving sales. On the other hand, marketers use paid search primarily to drive sales, leads, and conversion, and don’t expect the short text of their paid search ads to do much for branding.

But together, the two disciplines can increase the value that each program delivers. By creating social content that attracts an engaged audience, marketers can then craft targeted paid search campaigns to “capture” this audience and turn them into buyers.

As an example of how this works, consider these findings from an October 2009 study conducted by GroupM Search, M80, and ComScore. The report found that consumers exposed to a brand’s social media content are 2.8 times more likely to search on that brand’s terms. What’s more, consumers exposed to social media are more likely to perform deeper searches, going further down the purchase funnel and completing more purchases. Consumers exposed to a brand’s social media are 1.7 times more likely to search with the intention of making a purchase, and, overall, brands reported a 50% lift in click-through rates from consumers exposed to both social media and paid search, according to the study.

What these statistics show is that stronger brand awareness through social media helps drive paid search effectiveness in three ways:

• Target audiences are more likely to search (more impressions on your ads)
• Target audiences are more likely to click (more clicks on those impressions)
• Because of higher clickthrough rates, ads are placed higher on page (higher quality score)

Smart Strategies

There is no silver bullet for integrating search and social, but there are several concrete strategies every marketer can use to start bringing the two disciplines together. Here are a few tips to help you optimize social and paid search programs to work in a complimentary way to boost overall ROI.

• Make your social campaigns search-friendly. Make sure your social media programs (Facebook, Twitter, viral video, etc.) are appropriately tagged and indexed, and that metadata for pages includes your top keywords. This will allow people searching for your brand content to not only find your paid search ads and natural search results, but to find your social media content as well. The first step to building brand engagement through social activities is to enable consumers to easily find your content.
• Experiment with keyword advertising on social media sites. Facebook and YouTube both allow for keyword targeted advertising, but the way that these ads work is vastly different from how advertising works on Google or the Content Network. Facebook ads allow you to target users based on preferences they list on their profile. For example, a retailer selling DVDs would create ads that target interests such as “action movies,” “horror,” or “funny movies.” YouTube’s advertising system allows you to target specific user queries. However, remember the queries that occur on YouTube are different than those on Google, because users on YouTube are searching for content, not products. For example, people may be trying to find “Avatar trailer” or “car scene from Modern Family,” rather than searching for a particular DVD, so make sure to target your ads to these more specific types of search queries.
• Create social media-influenced paid search campaigns. Closely analyze the topics and discussions taking place around your social media campaigns, and then mine these discussions for new keywords you can use in paid search campaigns on Google, Yahoo, and Bing. Whatever people are talking about, bid on keywords that reflect these conversations. As always, you should measure the performance of these campaigns to prune non-performing ads and increase investment on terms that are more likely to capture downstream conversions. In addition, consider running controlled experiments with social media advertising turned off and on, so you can measure the impact these campaigns have on your paid search programs by observing changes in your paid search click-through and conversion rates.

By quantifying the uplift that social media delivers to your paid search programs, you can gain insights into your marketing programs that search marketers who limit their view to just one channel do not –- and improve the performance of both your paid search and social programs.

Welcome to SwissNet, Inc.

SwissNet, Inc. was created to inform people about business and technological opportunities in Switzerland. You will find us on our website and on our groups at Ecademy, LinkedIn and XING.

If you are interested in Switzerland as a business location, SwissNet, Inc. can help you target this market} With Switzerland's economic resources, Switzerland is one of the top global economic actors. The process of basing a foreign business in Switzerland involves a large number of strategic decisions and administrative tasks. SwissNet Inc. is here to support you by providing the type of preliminary information you will need.

Switzerland, as a country, has excellent structures to enhance your global success strategy.

The Swiss markets offers you access to the German, French and Italian markets and you will be able to test and succeed large global markets. Whether you are selling in Switzerland or you working in Switzerland, SwissNet, Inc. can advise you how to expand and how to find
new contacts, leads and sales on a global scale!

SwissNet, Inc. has the expertise, the cultural background, and the business know-how
to help you achieve your personal and professional aspirations.

Become our partner, associate or ambassador wherever you are!

Just enter into contact with us in clicking here and filling out the questionnaire.