Bubble speech with cut out phrase “branding” in the paper.
There are few ways to massively increase your total addressable market than by increasing your market’s geographic locations. By simply expanding your brand from a local, regional, or national one to an international one, you instantly unlock a whole new set of people that you can sell your product or service to.
If you’re wanting to reap the benefits of global branding, but aren’t quite sure of where or how to start, then you’re in the right place. In this article, we’ll explore a few core global marketing strategies that any company looking to stamp their place in the multinational conglomerate world needs to know.
First Things First: Prove Your Market
First things first: you have something to do before you get all excited about your new market. Don’t spend time and money in setting up marketing platforms and strategies without first proving that the market will purchase your product
You do this in much the same way as when you started the local brand. You have to leverage testing. Try giving your product or service free to a few select customers in the international market that you know will provide you very good feedback. Once they have got used to the product or service, ask if they are willing to switch to paid customers to not lose the service.
If the customers in the market truly want your product or service, then they’ll pay to keep it. Otherwise, you know that it isn’t truly essential to them and that your product or service may not be a good fit for this particular demographic.
Once you have your market proved (and only then), you can now start planning how best to attack it from a marketing perspective.
Research Customer Behavior in the New Market
Start researching how customers behave in the new markets that you plan on tapping into. You’ll have to do this for each individual market that is significantly different from the others. There are a lot of factors to customer behavior, but we’ll go through a few primary ones quickly.
Firstly, how do they tend to buy products or services in this industry? Is it a long buying cycle where they have to think about it for a while? Or is it more of a quick, on-the-spot sale?
Second, how often do they buy this product or service? Are they typically one-and-done, or are they instead repeat customers that mean recurring revenue?
Third, find out if there are any complementary products that they use alongside your product or service. This will give you an excellent chance to identify potential partners to work within your marketing, or even companies to merge with.
Change Product Names
Once you’ve researched customer behavior, you should also have a good understanding of what the product is typically called in this industry. Some product names that have worked in a specific location or region just won’t transfer over well to new markets. Thus, you have to get back to the drawing board and think up new names to cater to the market.
Don’t be afraid to take the time to use focus groups to ensure that you’re picking the right name. Once you pick one and go with it, it will be very hard to change it for any reason.
Create New Marketing Copy
New marketing copy for each product or service must be created in the right languages. Even if the new market utilize the same language (for instance, the UK and America both speak English), the truth is that there are different dialects and ways of speaking in the different markets. Thus, you should only utilize copywriters who speak that dialect of the language natively, as they will have the best idea of how to position the product or service.
Register Appropriate Domain Names
If you’ve already got the .com for your website registered, try to get ahold of all of the domain names with the appropriate TLDs (top-level domains) for the country. For instance, get a .co.uk if you’ll be selling in the United Kingdom. Get a .in if you’re going to be selling in India.
Then, you can redirect customers who visit your website from those regions to the right website with the right TLD. This will make your company look infinitely more professional.
Utilize Social Media With the International Perspective
Your marketing strategy should already be leveraging the power of social media, and the story is no different when you go international. If you are planning to keep your operations in these markets separate as very different business entities, with marketing departments staffed with different folk, then you can even create separate social media accounts for each market.
Either way, ensure that you use the research of the customer behavior that you worked on above whenever you create social media copy.
Leverage a Branding Company With International Experience
Last but not least, consider hiring a branding company that has significant international experience. The law of comparative advantage states that someone that has more experience doing a task will be far more efficient at it than you. So why take risks by trying to plan all of your global branding strategies by yourself if you’ve never had that experience?
By working with the right branding company, you’ll not only learn how to execute a global marketing plan, but you’ll also ensure that you can avoid the common mistakes that the company’s clients typically make.
Global Branding Made Easy
There you have it — a quick guide that should make global branding easier for your company. You know that the benefits of global branding are limitless. You’ll join the upper echelon of companies that make it to the international stage. Not only that, but you are also vastly increasing your target market which can only mean much more revenue in the long run. All that remains is for you to utilize these tips to begin planning your global marketing assault now.
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