Here’s my latest post for client Pitney Bowes:
Any company with global aspirations cannot afford to ignore the Asia-Pacific (APAC) region. It’s a region that includes more than two billion people across more than 20 countries, ranging from Australia to Indonesia to China and Japan.
But it’s also a region with significant linguistic, cultural, and political diversity. The APAC acronym may be useful in helping to think regionally, but when it comes to expanding into a given region, the best thing you can do is quickly narrow your focus to one or two specific countries.
This article (the first of two) offers some high-level strategic best practices to consider and focuses on four countries: China, Taiwan, Japan, and South Korea.
A few excerpts…
According to China’s Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC), there are now 460 million mobile web users in China. In many parts of Asia, an Internet user and a mobile user is considered one and the same.
And…
Some companies have registered the .asia domain as a pan-Asian “front door” to their websites. But this domain is best used as a regional landing page only — one that users then click through to their country websites. Country codes also send a strong signal to search engines that your website is indeed local — resulting in improved search rankings (provided you’ve also invested in translation).
Here’s the full story.
