What European Businesses Need To Do In This Time of Crisis

On Monday, August 8, 2011, share prices in Athens stock exchange fell to the lowest level in over 14 years, since January 1997. Debt-ridden Greece wasn’t the only European nation to have recorded a down market that day.

Europe’s financial crisis has affected such eurozone economies as Portugal, Ireland, Italy and Spain as well, and the situation doesn’t look to be getting better.

In this time of crisis, businesses, especially small- to medium-sized businesses, all over Europe have an important, supportive role to play. They must seek new markets for their products and services, besides reaching out to emerging markets, especially the emerging markets indicated by British stock market indices and associated data services provider The FTSE Group (their list of emerging markets: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emerging_markets#FTSE_list) and American publishing and financial information firm Dow Jones (theirs: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emerging_markets#Dow_Jones_list).

After you’ve targeted suitable new markets, one effective way to penetrate is to do internet marketing. This way you can effectively generate interest in your products and services in those markets as well as rest of the world.

A professional internet marketing firm can make sure that your business messages be seen by people of your target markets. What your internet marketing firm would do to achieve that is:

• make sure that your website appears on the first search result page on most used search engines in your emerging markets for the keywords people in that market use to search for the products/services that you offer.
• increase visibility of your products/services on highly visited social networks/media sites such as Facebook, Google+, MySpace, LinkedIn, YouTube etc.

It is extremely important that you work with a professional internet marketing firm whose services are affordable. Here are some tips for you to recognize a professional internet marketing firm:

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• A professional internet marketing firm should have some clients’ testimonials displayed on its website. One way to find out if the testimonial is genuine is to visit the website mentioned under the name of the testimony giver.
• Check out the blog – a good internet marketing firm has a blog on which its experts regularly demonstrate their mastery of internet marketing via useful posts.
• Since arguably half of internet marketing is writing, see if the internet marketing firm has a team of writers.

A good, professional internet marketing firm can assist businesses enter new markets and realize true commercial success. If you haven’t thought about taking your products/services to new markets yet, it can be the best time to do that.