You are doing wonders in your locality. Great! You deserve a pat on your back. Your growth marketing strategies have yielded handsome returns. Now, it is time to take your startup to countries overseas. Can you repeat your same success overseas?
Creating Your Global Marketing Strategies
Well, my friend, it is not easy to create marketing strategies for a global startup as your target audience will be entirely different. And it is most likely to happen that you have to promote your products or services to people whose language is different, culture is different, and beliefs are different. Therefore, it will be quite a challenge for you to maximize the success of your startup in a foreign country.
Seven Growth Strategies
In this post, I’m going to discuss seven growth marketing strategies that will help you better market and promote your startup overseas.
1- Keep Your Marketing Messages Simple
Your marketing messages play a vital role in the success of your marketing strategies. Obscure words and jargons (most especially the idioms of each culture) weaken marketing messages. Using these will reduce their impact of your message on your audience.
Adopting a KISS (keeps it simple and short) formula for all your marketing and branding communications will enable people from different walks-of-life to comprehend your messages with ease, which will eventually improve your conversion rate.
Tips on crafting marketing messages for a foreign audience:
Never meander - always get to the point quickly.
Use familiar words.
Write short sentences in an active voice
Keep your tone informal and friendly.
Focus on a "benefits" message.
Your marketing messages are your interactions with your audience. Keep your messages simple and clear if you want to leave a lasting impression on your prospects and customers.
2. Understand the Cultural Differences
The culture diversity of any country plays an important role in influencing the purchase decisions of people in that country. You will want to spend some time to really understand the culture of the country you are going to launch your startup in.
Failure to listen, understand and adopt differences.
If you fail to understand the culture of a foreign country, you might end up making embarrassing mistakes in your marketing communications, jeopardizing the chance of your startup’s success in your foreign country of choice.
Here are some proven ways that can help understand the culture of a foreign country:
Try to understand the core cultural beliefs and events of the country.
Get your marketing message reviewed by a cultural expert in an overseas country.
Keep tabs on social media in a foreign country to know the mood of the people there.
As people are sensitive to their beliefs and cultures, you should be extra careful when you are creating growth marketing strategies for your global startup. For the most part -- people from each country I've been in -- are willing to help you understand if you are sincere. Usury is readily apparent and is not appreciated in any country.
3. Choose the Right Communication Channels
No matter how persuasive your marketing messages are, they cannot yield results if people don’t see them. So you should leave no stone unturned to boost the reach of your marketing message. Choosing the right communication channel is the first step to get your messages in front of a mass.
Yes there will be homework.
Do your homework, and find out the preferred method of communication in the country where you are going to launch your startup. For example: VK.com is very popular social media platform in Russia and TENCENT QQ is a fad in China -- and it's moving along at a fast pace.
Also, you should also find locally focused, industry-specific websites overseas to promote your startup.
4. Leverage the Power of Content Marketing
Needless to say, people have become marketing averse. You will not be able to push nor sell to anyone in any country in the old traditional ways. Pressure doesn't work and is not appreciated in any country at present. You will have to increase your information and methods to find success.
The most effective way to market your products or services is to educate people so that they can make an informed decision. This is what content marketing does. Seth Godin, who is often referred as the father of modern marketing, said once: content marketing is the only marketing left. Are you ready to reap the benefits of content marketing while marketing your startup overseas?
Here are some tips on leveraging the power of content marketing for your global startup:
Research new territory and build marketing persona.
Create content that solves your audience’s problems.
Promote content and measure its success.
Content marketing will not only increase brand awareness but also build a loyal audience for your global startup.
5. Be a Social Media Superstar
Social media is an excellent tool to reach your target audience. You should make an aggressive social media marketing strategy to promote your startup overseas.
But -- how -- can you do it?
First of all, you need to find out popular social media platforms in the country where you are going to launch your startup. Some countries have popular local social media platforms, so you should do proper research to make sure that you have found the right social media platform to focus your efforts.
Here are six key steps in creating an effective social media plan for your startup:
Understand your target audience on social media
Set goals/objectives.
Identify key metrics.
Audit your current social media presence.
Create and curate content.
Analyze and optimize.
Follow these steps and create an effective social media marketing strategy for your global startup.
6. Rope in Local Influencers
Influencer marketing is the next big digital growth strategy. As influencers are already established in their respective fields and people already trust them -- roping in influencers to help spread your message -- can add authenticity to your global startup.
Make a list of the country's local influencers in your industry.
Make a list of local influencers who are relevant to your industry. Then, do proper research to know what they like, what they share on social media, and what they (themselves) are driven by. This will help you better plan an outreach strategy for your influencer marketing campaign.
7. Execute International SEO
International SEO an effective, scalable and cost-effective way to grow a business in a desired foreign target market. If you want to turn your startup into global business find a larger reach -- your international audience -- International SEO will help you realize your dream.
The most important thing for International SEO is to find keywords/key-phrases that are used locally and optimize your business for those keywords. In other words, you will have to master localization for international SEO to ensure success.
Understanding International SEO is a full SEO process.
International SEO is a full SEO process that requires research and analysis to find the best strategies to target an international audience. If executed properly, international SEO will make your startup successful in a foreign country without breaking your bank.
Conclusion:
Creating growth marketing strategies for a global startup is not an easy feat as you will often be dealing with people from different cultures and beliefs.
Keep your message simple and straight forward.
Remember to:
-- Keep your marketing message simple.
-- Understand the cultural differences.
-- Pick the right communication channel.
-- Leverage the power of content marketing.
-- Promote on social media.
-- Do influencer marketing well.
-- Do effective international SEO.
With these seven strategies, there is no reason why you shouldn't be able to maximize the success of your global startup.