[Summary]
Ten years after founding Euro-Marketing Associates, a company
based in San Francisco and Paris, Bill Dunlap launched in 1995
Global Reach, a marketing consultancy helping U.S. companies to
expand their internet presence into an international framework.
This included translating a website into other languages, actively
promoting it, and using local online banner advertising to
increase local website traffic. Bill Dunlap explained in December
1998: “Promoting your website is at least as important as creating
it, if not more important. You should be prepared to spend at
least as much time and money in promoting your website as you did
in creating it in the first place. With the Global Reach program,
you can have it promoted in countries where English is not spoken,
and achieve a wider audience... and more sales.”
***
In 1995, Bill Dunlap launched Global Reach, a marketing
consultancy helping U.S. companies to expand their internet
presence into an international framework. This included
translating a website into other languages, actively promoting it,
and using local online banner advertising to increase local
website traffic.
Ten years earlier, Bill Dunlap founded Euro-Marketing Associates,
a company based in San Francisco and Paris. He wrote in December
1998: “There are so few people in the U.S. interested in
communicating in many languages -- most Americans are still under
the delusion that the rest of the world speaks English. However,
in Europe, the countries are small enough so that an international
perspective has been necessary for centuries. (…)
Since 1981, when my professional life started, I've been involved
with bringing American companies in Europe. This is very much an
issue of language, since the products and their marketing have to
be in the languages of Europe in order for them to be visible here.
Since the web became popular in 1995 or so, I have turned these
activities to their online dimension, and have come to champion
European e-commerce among my fellow American compatriots. Most
lately at Internet World in New York, I spoke about European e-
commerce and how to use a website to address the various markets
in Europe. (…)
Promoting your website is at least as important as creating it, if
not more important. You should be prepared to spend at least as
much time and money in promoting your website as you did in
creating it in the first place. With the Global Reach program, you
can have it promoted in countries where English is not spoken, and
achieve a wider audience... and more sales. There are many good
reasons for taking the online international market seriously.
Global Reach is a means for you to extend your website to many
countries, speak to online visitors in their own language and
reach online markets there."
Bill added in July 1999: "After a website's home page is available
in several languages, the next step is the development of content
in each language. A webmaster will notice which languages draw
more visitors (and sales) than others, and these are the places to
start in a multilingual web promotion campaign. At the same time,
it is always good to increase the number of languages available on
a website: just a home page translated into other languages would
do for a start, before it becomes obvious that more should be done
to develop a certain language branch on a website."