If you are trying to market overseas, where should you be putting your marketing web spend?

Marketing to consumers across the globe is easier to organise, analyse and improve upon than ever before. We don’t need to travel halfway around the world to organise a little exposure.

With an internet connection and a spare hour, you can set up online marketing campaigns that can be seen moments later by customers from Los Angeles to Prague.

Where you should be distributing your web marketing dollars should be entirely driven by your customers. Overseas customers are going to be different to those in Australia.

They spend time online in different places, trust and respect the opinions of different experts, celebrities and publications.

I’m sorry to tell you there is no exact formula for dividing up your web marketing spend. It’s a matter of testing, refining and spending nights glued to your Google Analytics reports.

To determine where to start with your online marketing spend and how to refine and perfect it, follow this easy three-step process:

1. Make a list of the 10 most popular places your overseas markets spend time online

With a list of online marketing opportunities finalised, determine how you can promote to the audience of these sites. They may offer banner advertising, social media promotion, post sponsorship, competition collaboration or their own unique formula. Regardless of the type of promotion, the marketing opportunity will include a link to drive traffic to your website.

2. Create unique links for each location

Google’s URL builder lets you create a unique link for each ad variation that you run. You can define the type of campaign (banner ad, social media link, sponsored post article, etc) and the name of the source (the site that you’re investing in).

3. Analyse, analyse and analyse some more

When you go back to Google Analytics, your traffic sources report will provide a list of how customers were driven to your website. Using this, we can determine how much traffic was driven by each campaign, how many sales each campaign was responsible for and what sort of ROI they are delivering.

Use this data to plan your future marketing spend, investing in mediums that convert well and offer the highest return on investment.

Remember that you’re not going to get the mix perfect the first time. But by investing enough so that you’ve got sufficient data to make decisions, and then by analysing your analytics data, you’ll quickly be able to separate the non-performing campaigns from the ones that are driving sales.