Dan Quayle, the former US vice president, once stated somewhat erroneously ìWe have a firm commitment to Europe. We are part of Europe.î But however off- the-mark he was geographically, he wasn’t too far wrong if he was speaking about business. A Euro-vision of conquering the continent can achieve ‘nil points’ unless you have understood your database ñ and the peculiarities of B2B when it comes to data marketing.
Most marketing experts will agree that data segmentation is key when attacking any market. You have to target the right offer at the right people at the right time, and the content should be driven by the segmentation, rather than trying to fit the database around your latest creative.
This applies in Europe more than anywhere else in the world, where there is a single continent comprised of diverse cultures. Europe has 20 official languages with Irish set to become the 21st in 2007. These cultural differences present enormous challenges for marketers, and the added complications and pressures of B2B marketing don’t make things any easier.
Marketing is about achieving ROI, but when you look at the costs of the localised materials, databases and natural language conversion associated with marketing products in Europe, you might be forgiven for being sceptical about being able to justify the spend to the board. US marketers don’t have this problem, can market in bulk and push down costs, thereby raising ROI on campaigns and pushing more money back into the marketing mix.
However, when one delves a little more deeply, it becomes clear that the US does have a similar problem. In fact, according to the Martin Luther King Association Data Centre, 176 languages are spoken in the US. English is by far the most widespread, with over 215 million speakers. However, 28 million speak Spanish. That’s over half the entire population of Spain. Two million speak Chinese, while the non-English-speaking population of the US is over 46 million ñ roughly the population of the Ukraine.
It is generally accepted in the US that English is the unofficially accepted language. However, in federal Europe, sources estimate that around 47 per cent of the population speaks English, either as a first or alternative language. This gives marketers looking to approach Europe from the UK a tremendous advantage. Localisation (and by that I mean translation and adaptation to suit the territory) is important, but not critical, at least initially.
The key is the segmentation. As an email marketing technology vendor, I often come across too many marketers concentrating too heavily on the mechanisms. Yes, email technology is important, yes content is important, but not at the expense of the data. Data moulds your content, not the other way round. Successful emarketing begins and ends with data, and this is something we are encouraging our customers to concentrate on.
If you have segmented your data accurately and carefully, you will then obtain a better idea of how to approach the content, and how to localise it. Segmentation allows marketers to drill down into the data to increase its value.
Privacy laws in Europe require marketers to be more thoughtful about data use, but obtaining accurate data is increasingly difficult given the strict privacy laws and ‘opt-in’ culture of Europe.
EU directives on privacy and data are just that: directives, and they need to be interpreted by individual countries. This makes it harder for the pan-European marketer as there is no generic ‘European’ model. However, localisation doesn’t need to be the answer, you first need to understand the challenges of what you wish to do in each market and structure your data accordingly. You should be able to segment your data based on the sales lifecycle of that market, or the culture.
For example, the French government is currently advocating a European search engine in order to stem the influence of US companies in that market.
In Germany, there are different rules for data use than in France, for example, or the UK. There, you can’t place sales calls to businesses unless you have been invited by that business to do so. A big question should therefore be: can you use your data in the way you intend in the country you are targeting? This then raises further problems in that (in B2B marketing) the marketing cycle is often longer, and more complicated, than in its B2C equivalent.
For a start, there are often more people involved in the decision making process, sometimes in many different geographies, than B2C. Marketers need to appeal to different people in the process with different messages ñ commercial managers will have different sweet spots to end-users and middle managers, for example, so your lists need to be more accurate. This is even more pertinent in some B2B companies for whom a mistake cost a big order to supply an entire office with PCs, for example, whilst in other B2C companies a mis-lead could cost the price of one mobile phone ñ rather less.
Furthermore, the commercial managers in an organisation may be in Lyon, and the users in Slough. The IT infrastructure may be hosted in France with the call centre in India. B2B marketers need to allow for the complex structures, differing pressure points and diverse geographies, as well as the changing legislation of those countries in which they are situated.
Google’s recent blacklisting of BMW in Germany, and warning of Ricoh in the same territory, demonstrates how some areas of marketing are becoming homogenous ñ in this case depending more on satisfying Google’s view of internet ethics, rather than an individual’s territories.
However, it demonstrates that different countries in Europe have different rules ñ it’s not the whole of BMW’s Internet presence that is in trouble with Google ñ and marketers need to act accordingly with their data. In this case, Google has acted to enforce its own regulations on Internet best practice. However big BMW’s brand is, the fact that its local site cannot be accessed through the world’s most popular search engine this will have an impact.
Imagine what would happen if your brand was blacklisted in a major European market. Your DM and email could be offering the best thing since sliced bread ñ or even sliced bread itself ñ it wouldn’t make a difference if it’s not getting through.
