Practice has proved that the strategy of solving the customer information problem at the company level is very successful, because in this way, salesmen do not have to spend a lot of time looking for customers, but spend time on communicating with customers, which also improves the speed of new customer transactions and customer satisfaction; at the same time, the personnel who are responsible for obtaining customer information have also explored many very professional and unique methods because they are specialized in this work, and the effect is amazing. Although the final success is not entirely attributed to our professionalism in obtaining customer information, the rich overseas customer information is undoubtedly the starting point for the success of opening up the international market, so this professionalism does bring us a great advantage. Compared with our competitors, we win at the starting point.
How to use search engines effectively to find foreign customers? With the improvement of search capabilities and search performance of search engines like Google, in theory, a good search engine can almost include the website information of any target customer who is online. Of course, for customers who are not “online” (neither have their own company’s independent website nor have they been mentioned on other websites), search engines have no way.
Furthermore, it is already the 21st century, and there are customers who have not appeared on the Internet. Personally, I think that such companies are not worth developing for the time being, and it doesn’t matter if they can’t be found. These target customers who are not online are likely to be newly established small companies, or they do not attach importance to corporate publicity at all. Such companies are often not ideal target customers in international trade. Of course, some target customers have established their own websites, but have never registered with search engines, but this part is a minority after all, and we can ignore it.
Under the guidance of this idea, we have a strong desire to find customers through search engines, and our intuition tells us that as long as the search method is used properly, we should be able to search out many potential target customers. I really want to make the search engine so smart that as long as we tell it the product, it can list all the included customers according to the degree of relevance, and only give the search results of potential customers without any redundant information. Unfortunately, search engines are not yet “intelligent” to this extent. What we can do now is to make full use of multi-keyword restrictions, the advanced search functions of search engines and our professional knowledge to improve the relevance of search engine search results.
It should be noted that the search engine’s search results for the same keyword may be different at different times, because many search engines are dynamically sorted according to the popularity and content changes of the website.