Breaking into a foreign market is perhaps one of the most difficult things to accomplish as a business. However, if you’ve set your sights on overseas customers then it’s a good idea to start early so that you can build your processes around attracting international audiences. So to help you out, we’ve put together some brief but helpful strategies that can push you into a foreign market.
1. Understanding International Audiences
The first thing to accomplish is to gather an understanding of international audiences. This can be tricky as a humble startup as you’ll typically lack the resources and manpower to carry out such a large research project. As a result, you’ll want to rely on third-party services and reaching out via social media to learn more about what international audiences want. Ideally, you’ll already have a solid product or service that can be pivoted to attract overseas audiences, thus requiring very little change in order to appeal to new customers.
2. Selling Online to Overseas Customers
One of the best ways to break into a foreign market is to simply start selling internationally. This will rely a lot on your digital presence in order to truly attract an international audience, but it’s a great way to start offering your products to more customers across the world. You’ll want to ensure that your shipping costs are fair and affordable for customers so they don’t feel like they’re getting ripped off. Unfortunately, this may be difficult to achieve as it generally involves raising your prices to account for overseas shipping.
3. Attracting Attention via Social Media
Social media is another powerful platform that will allow you to break into a foreign market. Since social media can be used in virtually every country, it allows your products to reach a global audience, effectively tapping into a global market instead of considering it a country-specific one. This allows you to build an international presence that can be used to learn about international markets and pinpoint your advertising and product upgrades to appeal to a certain demographic.
4. Translating Your Products
Another way to get overseas customers to take notice of you is to offer products in their language. While simple things like product descriptions can be interpreted with a regular translation service, you’ll need to rely on companies such as International Language Services, Inc. to provide technical translations. This will help ensure that translations of documents, manuals and other important context-sensitive information are as accurate as possible, giving your overseas customers an accurate representation of your brand.
5. Hiring Dedicated International Staff
Lastly, you can start to hire dedicated staff members that are focused on growing your brand in different countries. For example, hiring a community manager that is fluent in a different language can help you spread your products and messages to a different market while also interacting with those customers directly. It can also help to reach out to influencers that speak different languages, effectively growing your international digital presence.
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