In 2017, China’s foreign trade import and export volume increased by 20.9% over the previous year. In 2018, China’s foreign trade industry continued to show a thriving overall trend. Many people have seized this opportunity and joined the foreign trade industry. For foreign trade rookies who have just started, how to find customers has become a problem they are worried about. Uncle Google will systematically summarize how to find customers from both online and offline aspects today.
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Find customers offline
Find customers online
Find customers offline
Exhibition
When it comes to finding customers offline, exhibitions are definitely one of the best ways for foreign trade personnel to find customers. While showing products and corporate image to customers, exhibitions can attract a large number of real users, realize order conversion and long-term accumulation of customers. Finding customers at exhibitions mainly involves attracting customers through exhibitions, activities, flyers, etc., so that they leave their email addresses, phone numbers, company names, etc.
How to find customers when foreign trade is just starting?
Friends, customers referrals
Network resources are one of the essential conditions for foreign trade personnel to start a business. It is a good way to frequently contact friends and customers around you and let them help you expand your customer resources. But you must grasp the degree and do not cause disgust among friends or customers.
Customs data
Customs data from each year is a very valuable resource. Many websites or software will provide customs data for free. Detailed customs data will include the customer’s company and contact information, so this data is a potential treasure for foreign trade personnel. Reasonable use of customs data can help you accumulate a large number of high-quality customers.
Customs data
Set up overseas offices
Setting up overseas offices in the main markets of the products not only enables face-to-face contact with local customers, but also expands the local market and increases brand awareness in the local area.
Investment promotion conference and bidding conference
Activities such as investment promotion conferences and bidding conferences are great opportunities to expand your network and customers, but you must choose the right type of activities. You can only achieve better results by choosing activities that potential customers of your products often attend.
The advantage of offline promotion is that you actively go to customers’ homes, usually with your own brochures and samples to negotiate.
You can directly see and understand
The products, and communication is more intuitive. Face-to-face communication between people also increases trust.
However, the disadvantage of offline promotion is that offline salesmen need to find customers one by one, which wastes time and energy. Moreover, foreign trade is easily restricted by geographical location.
The development of the Internet has brought more opportunities to the foreign trade industry. In addition to offline methods, online methods not only solve geographical limitations and let the world know about your products, but also save a lot of time and money. So let’s take stock of the online customer search methods that are commonly used in China.
When evaluating the quality of phone number data, you ought to take into account the core quality dimensions of data analysis. These dimensions phone number library include. It is crucial that every aspect representing the phone number data in the database is complete will 90% fill rates. There’s little value in phone number data if it’s inaccurate as you won’t be able to reach contacts successfully.
Find customers online Official Website
When doing foreign trade on the Internet, a website is one of the essential conditions. Having a website can not only show your products, brands, contact information, business philosophy, etc. to the outside world, but also allow customers to find your website through search engines, so as to view and purchase products. When customers 10 effective tips to increase website seo ranking and clicks search in the browser, many relevant product search results will appear. Generally speaking, customers will choose websites with high rankings. SEO optimization is to help improve the ranking of your website. Therefore, if a website wants to rank high, it must be optimized by SEO.
Huanxin SEO
Search Engines
Well-known foreign search engines include
Google, Yahoo, Bing, Yandex, etc. If you enter keywords or the name of the client’s company in the search engine, various information will appear. Pay special attention to bidding websites, company information, corporate afb directory yellow pages, etc. Then go to the official website of the relevant company and call or email directly. For details, you can read this article written by Uncle Google: Google Customer Development Encyclopedia
Search Engines
B2B Platform
Everyone must be familiar with B2B platforms
Alibaba and Made in China are well-known B2B platforms in China, and the quality of customers on them is still very good. But as we all know, the competition on these platforms is very fierce. So it is recommended that you find some foreign local B2B platforms with less competition and higher profits.
Social Media
Speaking of social media, everyone must be familiar with it. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, WhatsApp, Snapchat, Viber, Google+ and other platforms are well-known foreign social platforms that everyone is familiar with. The monthly active users of the platforms are in the tens of millions or hundreds of millions. It is conceivable that the user base is very large. So now overseas social marketing is very popular in China, and everyone wants to get a piece of the pie and grab customers. Uncle Google has previously compiled a series of detailed tutorials on developing customers, which are listed here. Take a look if you need it:
Facebook Customer Development Directory
LinkedIn Customer Development Directory
WhatsApp Customer Development Directory
Pinterest Marketing Strategy
There is another powerful weapon that must be mentioned – advertising
Everyone knows that advertising is very expensive, but advertising is indeed one of the fastest ways to attract customers. For example, when you are just starting your foreign trade business, you have carefully prepared for a month and spent tens of thousands of dollars to participate in the exhibition, but you may only get 5 or 6 inquiries, while you spend hundreds of dollars a day on advertising and get more than 10 inquiries. Considering the cost issue comprehensively, you will definitely choose to place an advertisement. At present, there are mainly three types of advertising platforms used for overseas advertising:
Search engine advertising platforms
Google bidding, Bing bidding, Yandex bidding, etc.
Social advertising platforms: Facebook ads, LinkedIn ads, Twitter ads, Instagram ads, etc.
DSP advertising: Criteo, Vizury, SocioMantic, etc.
The disadvantage of online customer development is that customers have more choices, so they have higher requirements for the price and quality of their own products. The online prices of some products are open and transparent, so they will lose their price advantage.
There is no very strict boundary between online and offline customer development, and these two methods can be combined and utilized comprehensively. For example, obtain customer contact information through advertising, then call the customer to confirm the needs, or visit the customer company directly.
