How to grow your business in South Eastern Europe

An interview with Artur Michalak, Client Development Director Poland & CEE and responsible for growing Tradedoubler’s business also in the region south of Poland. Most clients mainly relate Tradedoubler to the biggest markets of Western and Central Europe, but due to a new cooperation we can now offer a lot more to our clients.

Artur, you have a new job title. What is your current role?

At the first glance it seems like nothing changed, as we only added CEE in my job title. 🙂 In reality, a lot has changed, as now it’s not only our key Polish clients I’m taking care of, but I have to take into consideration all the potential cooperation opportunities within the whole CEE region (especially regarding the markets: Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria). That broadens the perspective a lot!

Can you tell us a bit about the new cooperation that Tradedoubler has recently started to better serve the CEE market?

We have signed a special partnership agreements with 2 networks – Dognet and 2Performant.

2Performant.com is an affiliate and influencer network built on proprietary technology. With more than 4.2 million transactions generated for 700+ clients of 162 million euro GMV, 2Performant is now the market leader in Romania and Bulgaria and they’re growing fast in Hungary, Czech Republic and Croatia.

Dognet has been operating in the CEE region since 2013 and covers 5 markets. It started as a small Slovak network, but right after the start they launched activities also on the Czech market and until now they are also present on other CEE markets. Dognet has a very agile and flexible team and they have native affiliate managers for each country in order to fully support their publishers.

What are the benefits for our international clients? What has changed?

The undisputable change and benefit is the fact that our clients are able to grow their business with us not only in the countries where they’re present already, but also in the whole CEE region. Although, most of the countries seem pretty small in terms of population, in total it’s a significant part of Europe, always worth exploring and driving businesses there.

Can you give an example of a successful cooperation with an international client in the CEE markets?

One of the campaigns, Dognet is proud of is the affiliate project conducted for the Czech retailer 4home in 5 countries across the CEE. “We consider Dognet as one of the most important traffic sources. The network fully covers the Slovak, Czech and Hungarian markets. I cannot talk a lot about internal numbers, but what I can say is that affiliate marketing is delivering around 15-25% of all our conversions,” said Jan Skalický, Online Marketing Manager at 4Home.

As to the second partner – 2Performant – they work with over 700 advertisers, from international companies that want to build a strong foothold through affiliate marketing in the region like Orange, Top-Shop, Answear, Telekom, Hervis or Notino to companies that started in the region and expanded to multiple countries like Kalapod (Romania, Bulgaria, Greece, Hungary), Vivre (Romania and Bulgaria) or StarShinerS (Romania and Hungary).

What is your recommendation for clients who want to start growing their business in CEE?

First of all, it’s important to understand that each country has its own unique culture that determines the buying habits, and the marketing and communication policies must be adapted accordingly. A site with a local language version and a local language speaking representative is a must.

You also have to keep in mind small specifics of each country, e.g. in the Czech Republic customers usually expect the goods to be delivered the next day, while in Romania the telephone support is extremely important. That’s why we chose to cooperate with strong local players in order to be able to meet the required standards to be successful.

What do you expect from the future?

The first stage I’d like to achieve is to grow our client’s businesses in the CEE markets, especially for our current Advertisers from Western Europe, to the extend it can be comparable to our Polish figures.

The next stage is the obvious one – sky is the limit 🙂

Thank you very much for the interview, Artur!