A lot of multinational SEO campaigns fall down when the strategy is just to target a set of keywords, set up hreflang, and create content.
Understanding local customs, language, and consumer behavior is crucial for market penetration and creating brand resonance.
Creating a multinational SEO strategy doesn’t mean just doing international SEO.
Multinational SEO means taking into consideration cultural norms, understanding your target market from a user and competition standpoint, understanding purchasing power, buying cycles, and market-specific legalities.
With SEO facing new challenges like AI and increased multi-modal user behaviors, our international strategies need also to start to take into account wider data points and information in the overall business marketing mix.
5Cs Framework For Multinational SEO
There are a number of different models and frameworks you can use when developing your multinational national SEO strategy, but a relatively stable framework that requires wider business participation is the 5C analysis.
This framework helps product marketers identify their product’s unique selling points and understand what they can learn about their business, products/services, and potential market fit.
Company
When working with wider business stakeholders, you need to examine the offering portfolio, evaluate it against competitors, find differentiations, and determine how it best meets customer needs and reduces their friction points.
During this process, you will also identify areas where competitor products have an advantage over yours.
This also includes assessing any innovation or improvements necessary to stay competitive. You also need to consider the brand identity and reputation – how the company is perceived in the target market.
Sometimes perception is formed by variables outside of your direct control, and can even stem to political attitudes towards the company’s country of origin, or negative actions of competitors in the marketplace.
Customers
Analyzing customer buying behavior and their decision-making processes is crucial for understanding how consumers approach purchasing products or services.
This involves looking at how customers research, evaluate, and ultimately choose from various options.
Having a deep understanding of these behaviors enables businesses to refine their marketing strategies to better align with customer needs.
Sometimes, customer preferences come from historic marketing and advertising campaigns that shape markets. Good examples of this are the Ploughman’s Lunch in the UK and KFC as a Christmas tradition in Japan.
Competitors
Identifying key competitors is essential for gaining a clear understanding of the market landscape.
This process involves recognizing the major players targeting the same customer base and assessing their market share, growth potential, and competitive advantages.
Competitors can be classified into four main types:
Direct.
Indirect.
Potential.
Replacement.
The different types can influence a company’s market position and overall strategy.
A good example of these competitor types in action could be oat milk.
As an oat milk brand entering the U.S. market, you would have direct competitors such as Oatly, Planet Oat, and Minor Figures.
Your indirect competitors would be classic dairy milk brands like Dannon and Kirkland.
Your potential competitors would then be brands that offer similar products and are entering the oat milk market as a portfolio extension, such as Milkadamia and Chobani, and brands that offer other non-animal-based products to the same audiences.
Finally, your replacement competitors would be other non-dairy milk brands such as Malibu Mylk and Flax USA.
The realization you will come to from this phase of the 5C framework is the understanding that only a percentage of your possible Total Addressable Market (TAM) is directly looking for your exact product, but there are other products that also meet the same needs, albeit to different lengths and in different ways.
Collaborators
Several factors come in when making a full evaluation of how something is positioned within the market.
Channels of sales, online and physical presence, distribution method, relationship with its suppliers, price, and marketing strategy are variables relating to an item’s performance within the market.
The way a product is distributed speaks to how it reaches its end consumer.