4 More Expert Takeaways for Worldly Marketers

In my previous post, I shared four of my favourite takeaways from the first four episodes of The Worldly Marketer Podcast. They addressed questions around identifying which foreign markets to target, how much localization you’ll need to do, why you should take an interest in local pop culture, and how Google Trends can reveal new international opportunities.

In this post, I’m going to share four more must-know takeaways that any global-minded business owner or marketer should heed – this time from episodes 5 to 8 of the podcast.

Top 10 Languages for Global eCommerce (Besides English)

Do have an online business? Are you trying to grow a more international customer base? Smart thinking. We all know that the Internet is a much bigger, much more diverse place than it was even 10 years ago. According to Internet World Stats, there are now  3,345,832,772 active Internet users in the world. That’s over 3 billion – almost half the global population. Of those Internet users, only 9.4% are in North America, even though it’s the continent with highest penetration rate (88%). So where are the other 90.6% of the world’s Internet users? And what languages do they speak?

What’s the (Not-So-)Secret Sauce of Global Marketing?

In my previous blog post, I talked about why, in this day and age, it’s so important to think outside the English-speaking box and translate your web content into other languages. Of course, it’s a favourite message of the language-services industry. Translation providers have a vested interest in convincing you that, to be competitive in today’s global marketplace, a multilingual website is essential. Go ahead and call us biased. But it’s hard to argue with the statistics.

Why English-Only Websites Just Won’t Cut It Anymore

According to recent statistics compiled by We Are Social, there are now 7.357 billion humans on this planet. Of that number, 3.175 billion – almost half the global population – are active Internet users, and that proportion is growing every day.

That’s an amazing opportunity for online businesses, both big and small. But guess what? Most global Internet users don’t speak English as a first language. Let’s look at the top 12 countries with the highest number of active Internet users: