There’s little that can match the excitement of beginning an international expansion in business, but the many complexities involved in overseas growth can make the process rather daunting to even the most experienced business mind.
To offer a starting point and new perspective on the challenges ahead, Bubbles has compiled our top 10 growth hacks to kick your international expansion plans into gear based on over 13 years’ worth of experience in helping brands achieve overseas success.
1.Focus on a Small Number of Countries at a Time
You may have plans to take over the world, but focusing your efforts on a small number of countries at a time could help you to target each market more effectively. Simultaneously expanding into a large group of countries based on a shared language, for example, could lead you to overlook the specific cultural differences within each territory that could otherwise be key to securing your company’s success.
2. Focus on Anchor Markets
Connected to the first hack, when choosing which countries to focus on you can increase the speed of your growth by selecting ‘anchor’ markets, which are countries that may be easier to succeed in. This could include regions with a large gap in the market or lower business costs, which can then be used to penetrate larger but more challenging markets within the same area.
3. Recruit an Overseas Team
If you already have partners and contacts abroad, begin tapping into their knowledge to aid your global marketing efforts. If you’re yet to develop relationships with overseas professionals, recruiting a professional translation agency that has native speaking experts will help your integration into a new market.
4. Keep Translators Close By
Translation teams in particular are a vital source of expertise during expansion abroad. Not only can they help to adapt your marketing campaign into another language, but they can also localise all marketing communications to ensure they take into account local culture, regional trends and current events. This “transcreation” helps provide the most appropriate, rather than the most direct, translation.
5. Explore Local Trends
Working alongside your translation agency, you can research local culture and trends even further by integrating them into your regional strategy. There are a number of trend apps and programmes available to help you discover what’s ‘hot’ in your target country, and these can be developed into both short and long term marketing campaigns to encourage your new audience to believe in your brand.
6. Localise Marketing Content
Localisation can extend beyond trends, and adapting your website and content can attract traffic from a new market if you ensure you use language and information that connects with that audience. Additionally, you can localise content that’s already working well in your target market by translating it into the appropriate language, keeping cultural considerations in mind.
7. Work to Local Time Zones
Once you’ve translated your campaigns, they need to be adapted to the target time zone. This is particularly important for any online content such as blogs, emails campaigns and social media posts, which should be set to post at a time that will draw the most views in your target market. Typically, working around the local work schedule will help you gain the highest exposure.
8.Provide Local Contact Details
Once your website and other marketing materials have been adapted to the local time zone, it’s important to ensure you provide local contact details for potential customers. Thanks to the advancement in call forwarding technology, it’s possible to manage an international phone number from your UK base with a competent sales team.
9. Consider Co-marketing Campaigns
One way to get a quick foothold in a new market is to co-market with companies that already have a strong presence in your target country. Identify what your firm has to offer and locate companies that would benefit from a partnership. You can then consider sharing resources to deliver co-marketing campaigns that achieve greater reach.
10. Focus on Local Keywords
Expansion abroad offers companies the opportunity to target new areas of their industry thanks to the necessary change in keywords. There are a range of keyword planners available that can help you target the right areas of the market and adapt your content to ensure your new audiences find you through search engines.
A reliable translation service will help enormously when your company is expanding overseas. Bubbles provides accurate translations in hundreds of different languages. Get in touch today to find out more.
