So you’ve built up your small business to the point where it’s time to expand overseas. This is an exciting time for every business owner, seeing something that they’ve put everything into- time, money and resources- become successful enough that it reaches an international market. However, this time can also be filled with uncertainty, as new markets mean new dynamics and new customers to advertise to.
Because of this, multinational businesses often fail globally due to copying their home market strategies and not expanding their strategies to adapt to new market conditions. Not only can this lead to failure of marketing strategies and lots of capital wasted on campaigns that are not effective, but it also can lead to complete expansion failure, which can prove extremely costly for a business.
So if you’re planning on expanding or you already have and you want to avoid these 3 mistakes, read on and discover how you can market your business effectively whilst expanding abroad.
1. Replicating home market strategies globally
Many make the classic mistake of carrying on your national marketing strategy abroad when expanding globally. Depending on where you are expanding, this can lead to a poorly thought-out marketing campaign or even a disastrous camping that offends another country. This is where thorough research through testing and local product research is necessary to adjust pricing, messaging, and content s that appeals to a local market. This is especially important if you are targeting countries that are very different culturally, such as an American company expanding into Asia. Understanding these cultural differences and norms and applying these to your strategy is one way that you can replicate strategies that work in your current market globally.
2. Ignoring regional compliance and infrastructure
Assume that laws when it comes to digital reporting, taxing, and e-invoicing are the same all around the world. Before you even start marketing in other countries, it’s important to understand local laws and standards, as this can lead to heavy fines, disputed supply chains, and high friction when it comes to trading in a new country. Overall, if these aspects are not researched and implemented into marketing early on, this can lead to an expansion failure, which can be costly to a business. This could be understanding local regulations if you are selling spouse visas in the UK.
3. Relying on auto translation and SEO
When marketing online in a different region, not only do you have to think about domain changes and alterations to make your website readable in other countries, but you also have to think about SEO and auto-translation. Using automated tools or single URLs for multilingual content without proper tags and local knowledge can remove cultural nuance while also confusing search engines. This can lead to poor targeting and SEO practices, which can make your websites appear less on the search results page. Instead, make sure to hire local copywriters for the region and ensure that domain structures are properly structured. An example of this would be hiring someone with British citizenship to write content supposed to appear on a UK website.
