There’s more than one way to grow your brand. An effective, yet oddly underused, strategy is to expand your reach to include more potential customers. If you’ve already fully tapped your regional or domestic target demographic, then the next logical step is to look at expanding internationally.
While this can sound like a big undertaking, it’s actually more straightforward than most business owners believe. By taking a considered, methodical approach, your brand can be serving international customers in a matter of months. And once that happens, you never know what level of success might be possible.
In this post, we’re going to run through a few key steps to take before your expansion, which should increase your chances of success.
Check It’s the Right Time
As we said above, expanding into international territories is easier than you might expect — but that doesn’t mean that it’s easy. It’ll still require a significant amount of time, effort, and cash. You can make things much easier for yourself by checking that it’s the right time to launch overseas.
There are two key things to focus on when choosing whether it’s the right time:
- Do you have sufficient cash flow?
- Are you comfortably managing your current operations?
If the answer is no to one or both of these questions, then it’ll likely be better to wait.
Conduct Your Research
Expanding an online business into foreign territory is more straightforward than launching a brick-and-mortar business. Nevertheless, it’s still vitally important to conduct thorough market research. This will help to guide strategic decisions, and also just more broadly confirm that you’re expanding into the right country. Have a look at your potential competitors, your target demographic, and how easy it will be to get up and running (for example, is it easy to ship items to the country?).
Get Serious About Marketing
The success of your venture into an overseas market will depend, in large part, on the strength of your marketing. After all, you can’t expect potential customers to buy from you if they don’t know that your website exists! Keep in mind that your domestic SEO strategy will be ineffective if you’re targeting a foreign language market. Working with a company that can put together a multilingual SEO strategy will be key for ensuring your website gets seen by international customers. For social media marketing, it’s best to research which social media platforms are preferred; Facebook marketing might be effective in Brazil, but less effective in Norway.
Figure Out Practical Matters
Finally, it’s best to have a solid grasp on practical matters before you go all-in marketing your products to international customers. The three main areas to focus on are:
- Payment processors
- Shipping
- Returns
Those three will need to be watertight before you get started, since making missteps with any of them can lead to a poor customer experience — and potentially bad reviews — that can be difficult to recover from. There’ll be a viable solution for all of them, however, so it’s just a matter of conducting some research.
