For overseas marketing, there are great cultural differences in different markets. When facing overseas markets, especially when communicating with some European and American corporate customers, many people will be happy to share their views and opinions, and will also be patient to cooperate with you to solve problems in products and services. They will criticize your products for being bad, praise the highlights of the products, and actively interact. In the Chinese market, it is relatively rare to receive emails from customers praising a certain function of the product, and often the praise emails are mostly for personal efforts.
You can get better marketing results by communicating and interacting with your audience in an equal manner using the language and expression methods that your audience is accustomed to. The same is true for overseas social media marketing. For the topic being discussed, you should be more of a participant, rather than trying to change and reverse other people’s views, and don’t package yourself as an absolute authority. In the face of critical voices, you can face them positively and improve and enhance customer relationships through social media interactions. In the face of the voices of provocateurs, you can be neither humble nor arrogant, professional and graceful. Due to different cultural backgrounds, different target markets and different industry characteristics, there are many details that need to be carefully experienced in the process of engaging in overseas social media operations.
You should also pay special attention to the laws and regulations of relevant countries and regions and the user agreement of social media platforms. Some aspects that may not be taken seriously in domestic social media operations need to be paid special attention to when engaging in overseas marketing. For example, whether the images used have obtained legal copyright authorization. If you manage a corporate marketing account or homepage, whether the voice sent out will mislead potential customers and cause dissatisfaction or even lead to lawsuits; whether the products sold are clear and clean in the field of intellectual property rights such as trademark rights and patent rights, and can be promoted legally.
You should also be extra careful about the privacy protection of your customers or fans. For example, when using Facebook’s Customer Audience for secondary intervention (re-engagement) content promotion, Facebook has very strict requirements on whether advertisers strictly protect the privacy of others when placing advertisements.
The legal environment, especially the intellectual property environment and privacy protection, is often a place where domestic companies are prone to “touch mines” when engaging in overseas social media marketing. The lighter ones will be warned and the account will be frozen, and the more serious ones will be involved in lawsuits. The litigants will even bring the media platform, marketing agency and advertiser to court together. Many litigants will think like this: the litigation costs are roughly the same when filing a lawsuit against one infringer or against multiple infringers at the same time. Since there is no need to pay more costs, adding more litigation targets may result in more compensation, which will also bring greater pressure to the infringer. Therefore, it is common to see litigants dragging infringers and social media platform companies to the defendant’s bench. Even if the court finally rules that social media platform companies do not need to bear joint and several liability for infringement, this matter will cause great headaches for the defendant and damage the cooperative relationship between media platforms, marketing agencies and advertisers. For those engaged in overseas social media marketing, it is better to work hard to make all marketing content and methods legal and compliant rather than incurring risks or troubles due to non-compliant behavior.