Successful international marketing requires more than cloning your domestic marketing efforts
If you think it’s time to break into new markets, don’t just plan to clone your domestic marketing efforts. The strategy and messages that may resonate with home-country audiences may not work in foreign business landscapes. Before you start your global expansion plans, check these five marketing tactics:
Do due diligence. The first question: where should you expand? Look at your current international inquiries, web traffic, content downloads, webinar attendance, email responses, and other indicators. Research provides the competitive picture you need for a true market share analysis and delivers the cultural insights that can inform your outreach efforts.
Understand your market. Prioritize a country/region where you already have existing customers and, therefore, evidence of feasibility and greater knowledge of local buyer pain points. Beyond this, you need a firm grasp of the local business environment, buyer profiles/journeys (including how companies make technology purchase decisions), dealmakers/breakers in specific regions, and other nuances. Only then can you target the right audience with the right message at their preferred time and channels.
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Bridge the culture/language barrier. This means more than the obvious step - translating all marketing communication materials into the buyers’ primary language. It also means “localizing” - translating all website content, SEO, and search terms into the local context - even if you’re expanding into a country with the same language as your home country. If you offer truck fleet management, you’re selling lorry fleet management in the United Kingdom.
This ensures that your content will have greater relevance, and your search terms will be stronger and more relevant.
Build trust by being present. You don't have to set up a physical office. Webinars are the ideal virtual event for targeting a specific country or region; make sure you do it in the local language and include local representatives. Go to the major industry conferences in your target markets – RSA, for cyber in the United States and MWC for communications in the rest of the world. Once you have enough clients to reach critical mass, it may be time to hire a local representative.
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Start small. It may be enticing to target all of Western Europe or East Asia or even the United States, but don’t succumb to the false allure of massive profits - it could overwhelm you. Start small. Focus on a region that your research indicates needs your solution, has thousands of potential clients, and few, if any, competitors. Get your user cases/case studies and other sales-enablement content together as you find your feet so you can expand further and wider.
Getting Started
Creating an international marketing strategy is rewarding, but not easy. Avoid unnecessary blunders by partnering with K2 - a global marketing communications agency. Specializing in the B2B tech sector, K2 collaborates with clients across industries - from AI to IoT, from cybersecurity to storage - and across geographies – Australia in the morning, Silicon Valley at night.
Give us a call.