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How To Market Your Business Abroad
You may have built up a strong customer base in your domestic market, but building up your business abroad is another thing altogether. There are different cultural factors to consider, for example, and obviously your marketing strategy will need to be geared towards the tastes of consumers in the countries you are hoping to break into. But it’s worth putting the time into doing this, especially if you find you’ve grown as much as you can domestically. Here are some of the things to consider when you’re developing a marketing strategy for selling overseas:
Cultural Knowledge: If you’re going to be marketing your products in another country, then bear in mind that their cultural customs may well be very different to those in your domestic market. It may be that your products may have to be adapted to suit the tastes of your new customer base, or your advertising strategy may have to be re-thought. Simple things like colours in adverts can mean different things depending on where you are: for example, in the UK white tends to symbolise peace but in other places it can symbolise death. You don’t want to run the risk of causing offence, so identify potential risks beforehand.
Get Advice: You should be speaking to people such as your accountant of bank manager about your plans for expansion. It’s also worth talking to other companies or marketing advisers with international expertise so you can plan how to proceed. This will help when it comes to building your international networking skills and find out about specific financial or regulatory requirements.
Organised Business Plan: Your plan should be ambitious enough to enable you to grow but realistic at the same time. You should assess all the potential scenarios and figure out exactly where you want your growth to come from: do you want to focus on a particular customer group, for example, and how will you manage your marketing campaign to coordinate social media, advertising, press releases etc?
Establish Supplier Contracts: Another important decision to make is whether you will be manufacturing your products abroad or distributing them from the UK. Either way, you are going to need to develop relationships with reliable suppliers and distributors. This is another area where your advisers will come in useful, as they can put you in contact with the right people. When choosing your suppliers it shouldn’t all be about cost: you should look at whether they can offer good lead times and whether the quality they can offer is to the standard you would want.