If you’re operating in 2024, you know the business landscape has evolved significantly, with new challenges and opportunities emerging. Over the past few years, COVID created huge disruptions in many industries, artificial intelligence (AI) is moving at warp speed and reshaping how companies compete on the world stage, and turbulent geopolitics are causing business owners to rethink their international strategy.
Despite all this, for many companies, there’s never been a better time to “go global”, but there are still challenges to overcome.
How to get your message across in a new country is a big hurdle, and one that often trips up businesses looking to expand internationally. Too many founders and CEOs assume that they can take their tried and tested domestic marketing strategy and “copy, paste” it into an overseas market… with the same great results.
Unfortunately, that’s not how it works!
Each new market is unique, not just geographically and structurally, but also linguistically and culturally. Even in countries that appear superficially similar (like Australian and New Zealand, the United States and Canada, the UAE and Saudi Arabia or Hong Kong and China) there can be stark differences in social cues, the way that people communicate with each other, what kind of media they consume and how they prefer to buy.
This means that for each new country that you plan to sell to, you’ll need a tailored marketing strategy. In international markets, settling for generic marketing means settling for mediocre sales, or sometimes no sales at all!
Which brings me to my point…
How do I tailor my international marketing strategy?
Creating a great marketing strategy that connects with your ideal clients in a new international market can feel overwhelming, but like most things, when you break it down systematically, it’s achievable.
There are five key steps to getting your message across and making sales in a new country, and I’ll share those with you in just a moment.
1. Understand who your ideal international client is
First, let me emphasise that it’s crucial that you have a crystal clear, detailed understanding of who your ideal client is in any given market, before you start designing your marketing. Without this piece of the puzzle, any marketing strategy that you create is basically a shot in the dark.
You can identify who your ideal international client is by first segmenting the market to get a high-level understanding of their geographic, demographic, psychographic and behavioural characteristics. You can then conduct more in-depth market research to understand their needs and challenges better, and bring it all together into an ideal international client avatar to guide your sales and marketing initiatives.
2. Understand the cultural context of your target market
To create a tailored marketing strategy, you also need to understand the business and cultural context of the country you’re selling to.
In my experience, companies coming from a home market often don’t have a good understanding of the context that they’re selling into.
Where a business has been successful at home, it’s easy to believe that there’s no need to do the work to understand the ins and outs of how marketing works abroad. I’ve heard people say things like:
“We don’t need to do a lot of market research… we’ve been very successful in our home market and we have a great product. We can just keep on doing what we have done well”.
The reality is that when you cross national borders you cross cultural borders as well. In some cases you might find that you’re not even competing in the category you were competing in in your home market.
Your competition set could be broader and you might be speaking to a different kind of user base. For instance, at home you might be targeting the mass market, whereas crossing borders you might be addressing a more niche market which is more likely to use your product.
For example, we recently worked with a company that sells luxury prams to expand their footprint into European markets. We also wondered whether there might be an opportunity for them to sell to the Indian market, given the burgeoning middle class and appetite for premium products in that country. However, when we looked more closely at the business and cultural context and spoke to distributors on the ground,we realised that our assumptions were off. Although Indian consumers can afford to buy a premium pram, that’s not how Indian culture works. In many Indian cities, the weather and lack of footpaths mean that most people don’t walk with small children in prams the way they do elsewhere. Additionally, families that can afford a luxury pram can also afford nannies, and most wealthy families have helpers on hand to carry small children when the family goes out. And finally, wealthy Indian families love to shop abroad, so the relatively small number of consumers who might be in the market for a high-end pram would be likely to buy one when they visit Europe, the US or Australia.
Without a good understanding of the business and cultural context, it’s hard to craft a strategy to market products, services and brands in a way that makes a connection with the customer, makes the product interesting and really satisfies a need, because these elements are often culturally determined.
So, before you decide how many Instagram ads you’re going to run, take the time to really understand the environment you’ll be marketing in.
3. Understand the regulatory context of your target market
Before diving into specific strategies, it’s essential to understand the regulatory context of the country you’re targeting. GDPR, implemented by the European Union, is one of the most stringent data privacy laws globally and serves as a model for similar regulations worldwide.
Here are some examples of increasing data privacy laws around the world:
- California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA): Enacted in the United States, this law gives California residents rights similar to GDPR, including access to their data and the ability to request its deletion.
- Brazil’s General Data Protection Law (LGPD): Brazil’s LGPD, effective since 2020, regulates data processing activities and imposes strict penalties for non-compliance.
- China’s Personal Information Protection Law (PIPL): Effective since 2021, PIPL governs the collection, storage, and use of personal data in China, requiring companies to obtain explicit consent from users.
Understanding these laws is critical. Non-compliance can result in hefty fines and damage your brand’s reputation.
4. Choose marketing channels that work overseas
Once you’re clear on the cultural and regulatory context and customer expectations, it’s time to choose marketing channels that will be effective.
Once again, you can’t just assume that what works at home will work overseas. A classic example is where a company sells successfully in the US and Australian markets via Facebook and decides, as it enters the China market, that it will continue using this channel there.
If you know anything about China, you’ll know that Facebook is banned, so using it as a marketing channel is out of the question. If you want to go down the social digital marketing route for China, you’ll need to investigate platforms like Weibo and WeChat Groups, live-streaming and TikTok (‘Douyin’ in China).
As with the cultural context, it’s important to choose a channel that will actually be effective in your new market, rather than just going with what you know and hoping for the best.
5. Reverse engineer your marketing strategy for real results
Finally, you’ll get the best results if you make the effort to reverse engineer your marketing plan. This means basing your marketing efforts on the amount of sales you plan to make, rather than doing what so many companies do … ‘pay, spray and pray’.
In other words, don’t arbitrarily spend money on marketing in the hope of sales, but with a clearly defined goal in mind.
There’s a lot to this topic, but when you boil it down, the key here is to set targets and then work backwards to understand what kind of lead volumes will be required to meet those targets and what kind of campaigns are likely to drive those volumes of leads.
When a company expands overseas, there are many challenges to overcome. How to properly set-up, build a global team, ascertain compliance with local laws as well as how to best communicate and sell to the new market, the list may seem endless. But one thing is for sure, without properly marketing a product or service to your new market, you’re setting yourself up for failure. So if you’re considering global expansion, make sure to do proper market research and tailor your marketing strategy for success!
