Breaking into the international marketplace can catapult a company into increased profitability and growth more rapidly than when selling to a domestic market.

But how do you market your company successfully to overseas buyers? What can you do to provide the right information to prospective clients that is informative and engaging? How can you stand out from the crowd?

The most common promotional approach is to provide brochures. While brochures do play an important role, they can be uninspiring and ill equipped to convey a real feeling for what an organisation does and how they operate.

Furthermore, when brochures are translated into other languages it is commonly agreed that even the best translations are cumbersome and not reflective of how that particular language is used. This often means that international prospects feel less inclined to read brochures in depth.

So how do you show prospective clients how your product is made? What can you do to highlight your product range and its associated benefits?

A proven promotional method is corporate video production. The combination of moving vision with sound, allows complex messages to be communicated in a far superior way to that of any written information.

Research has found that video can be up to four times more effective than a printed brochure. Given that 80% of the information we recall is visual, it is understandable why audiovisual materials are so successful in getting messages across to viewers.

The best investment companies can make is by providing prospective clients with their corporate video on a VHS tape or a menu driven DVD disk or CDROM disk (which is like the menu option on a movie DVD).

CDROMs are particularly flexible as they can include video, brochures, documents and website links. They can even be produced as CD business cards which is perfect for travellers who wish to reduce the amount of marketing materials they need to carry.

Corporate videos can be downloaded from websites, which not only saves money in distribution costs, but provides 24 hour worldwide access.

A further advantage of corporate video is that it allows for voiceovers to be translated into a variety of languages. As visual cues are used in conjunction with the voiceover, the language sounds natural and appealing.

The winner of the 2002 Regional Exporter of the Year Awards, the Warrnambool Cheese and Butter Factory, strongly agrees with the use of corporate video production to boost export sales.

John Williams, Warrnambool Cheese and Butter Factory's marketing manager, says "We are very proud of our Factory and our picturesque location. It makes a lot of sense to show our best attributes to their advantage and the way to do that is through a corporate video."

"We've found corporate video to be extremely flexible. I can travel overseas and show a DVD quality video to potential clients on my notebook computer".

"We had a short promotional video created that was slotted into our Powerpoint presentation which we presented to a large Japanese dairy importer. It really gave us the competitive edge and helped us win a large multi-million dollar contract".

Justin Howden, an International Marketing specialist from Marketing and Investment Partners, also advocates using corporate videos when marketing overseas.

"For companies that are undertaking trade marketing, corporate video is critical. It is vital to get trade onside when marketing overseas and corporate video is irreplaceable when trying to get distributors involved," he says.

"A successful corporate video is created by finding out what are the most important pieces of information that your target market wants to know. You need to unearth what 20% of information will give you an 80% kick in marketing terms. Once you've done this, you then need to focus on these important points in the promotional video".

Corporate video production is a powerful, convenient and cost effective way for overseas buyers to see what you have to offer. It is an innovative method that can encompass video, brochures, documents and website/email links into one small CD business card.

By using a combination of the right promotional tools and a creative approach, the time-consuming and often difficult road to breaking into the global marketplace, can be made much easier.

(c) Marie-Claire Ross 2003. All rights reserved