9 Global Marketing Mix Tips –
Global marketing has many moving parts, which keeps a lot of businesses stay limited in their locality.
But, thanks to the internet and the ease with which you can communicate now, getting your brand in front of the world is easier than ever.
Although global exposure isn’t something you can achieve overnight, it’s worth the effort.
Let’s talk about some global marketing strategies that can help your brand expand without bounds.
Revise the 4 Ps of the marketing mix or the advanced 7Ps of the marketing mix and keep them in mind throughout this process.
1. Preparation
First, you need to make sure that your product is suitable for expansion. For instance, expanding a product in a country where your industry is banned wouldn’t make sense.
Moreover, you need to have a good understanding of your resources. For instance, do you have the team, tools, budget, and language expertise to make things happen?
Traditional VS Digital Globalization – Think about how you want to expand. Is it just digital or do you intend to operate physically in another country?
The traditional expansion would require a lot of work and resources. Whereas, digital expansion is easier than ever, thanks to the ever-growing digital platforms that make B2B and B2B communication a breeze.
If you want to do both, consider focusing on digital expansion first and try to understand the foreign market before moving in physically.
Moreover, you also want to check your corporate mindset before taking a leap. Promoting a corporate mindset can provide an impetus for growth and improve the chances of success.
Ask yourself a few questions:
- Is your executive team on board with your decision?
- How will this expansion affect your current operations?
- Do you have clear goals for internationalization?
- Is there a sizeable audience in the other country for your product?
- Can you effectively manage customer problems after expansion?
These are just a few questions to ask yourself before you devise a strategy to put your company in front of an international audience.
Know Important Concepts – Before you take the plunge, you need to understand a few basic concepts like global corporate mindset and digital internationalization.
For instance, you want to know what competencies your team requires in order to expand into a completely new market.
2. Strategy
Define Success – Before you do anything else, ask yourself a simple question: “Why do you want to develop a global marketing strategy in the first place?”.
- Is it just a test?
- Do you have a revenue goal?
- Are some countries more important than others?
- Do you want to reduce the risk by diversifying your revenue?
Before acting on your strategies, you need to be very clear about why you want to get into global marketing.
Prioritize Strategies – You might already have a lot on your plate. Every business does. So, you need to identify the most important issues and solve them first.
Only tackle the most important priorities first and avoid getting involved in the ones that aren’t worth your attention for now.
Need examples?
- Customer Retention: many brands start global marketing because they need to retain more customers.
- Profitability: Your main priority could be to boost your revenue per customer.
- Growth: If growth is your aim, you would need to optimize the top and middle of your marketing funnel.
- Diversification: For some, increasing diversification in their company is the main concern when expanding into an international market.
- Market Share: Want to snatch your competitors’ market share? You would need to optimize your bottom of the funnel content.
In addition, identify your company’s leaders and engage them with each other, creating a strong work environment.
Then, find out the people that will be affected by your global marketing success. This may include:
- Creative team
- Public relations
- Social media
- Localization
- SEO/link building
Keep them in the loop, find their problems, and try to address them.
Understand Roadblocks – Your next step in the expansion process should be to identify and understand any possible roadblocks in the way of your success.
Invest in Global Branding – All of your brand’s marketing assets should translate cohesively across every international market.
You also need to mold your brand according to local culture and demand as well.
For instance, a Mcdonald’s menu in Tokyo is different than it is in Texas.
Lastly, understand the logistics of the international market you want to operate in. For instance, see how the transportation of such goods would work in a country of your expansion.
3. Planning
Now that you have a strategy in place, you need to come up with a plan to achieve it. One way to understand your future goals to ensure your plan works successfully is to look back at what your competitors are doing and what marketing trends are happening in your industry.
Use Data – Data is your best friend when you are expanding in an international market. You would need actionable data to create a plan that’s measurable and trackable.
Look at:
- Number of customers
- Average selling price
- Average retention rate
- Number of opportunities
- Traffic
- Number of leads
- And, more
Before completely trusting the data, you should connect with your team, especially the salespeople. Ask for their feedback and see what they have in mind.
Create Long-Term Objectives – Now that you have done with all the preliminary work, get down to creating long-term objectives.
The time for which you should create your objectives would majorly depend on the size of your company.
But, you want to avoid getting too far with them as priorities can change with time.
Break into Small Goals – The next step is to divide those long-term global marketing goals into smaller ones. They can be quarterly or monthly. Just make sure they are S.M.A.R.T (Specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, time-based).
For instance, you could set your goals by country as opposed to by region.
4. People
Assemble Your Team – Next, assemble a team that’s not only competitive but also willing to take things international with you.
You also want someone who can lead your team’s global initiatives. Ideally, you want someone from that specific region. Someone who can effectively communicate in a foreign language.
Moreover, keep an eye for the people that have a hunger for global marketing. These are the people that you can trust the most with this initiative.
Plus, you need to have a team member that understands the local voice and has the desire to have a cultural approach.
Engage with Partners – If you don’t have team members that speak the language of the expansion region, you can work with partners.
Get help from a third party. These can be translation agencies, contractors, and local marketing agencies.
Next, rally the extended team, lay out your plan in front of them, and get feedback for moving forward. Your extended team can include anyone with a stake in your initiative.
Establish Internal Communication – When expanding internationally, it’s imperative to establish an effective communication channel within your organization.
Make sure every stakeholder is aligned with your goals and is functioning well.
Here are a few important communications vehicles:
- A place to give global visibility to your local success
- A place to showcase progress toward international goals
- A place to highlight global marketing and sales alignment
- A place to talk about global and local campaigns
Be Human-Centered – One of the most important things to do when you are going global is understanding the people of that region and connecting with them effectively.
You want your brand to have a human touch. Establish effective communication channels with your employees and customers and support them.
5. Process
Keep Your Content in a Centralized Place – You might have produced a lot of content and are willing to produce more to attract new prospects to your business.
Ideally, you want all of your content in one place so that anyone from your organization can access it easily.
Write Your Content Creation Process – Before you can create content for international markets, you need to write down the process that you will use to create it.
Write up all the steps involved in creating, publishing, and sharing your organization’s content.
Identify Differences and Similarities – Get your content team together and discuss the whole process. Identify the pros and cons of different content generation methods.
Decide a clear pathway for creating every type of content after all the team members agree.
Keep a Critical Eye – Once you have developed a strategy, don’t forget it. Instead, have a critical eye for any room for improvement and don’t shy away from revisiting your strategy.
Learn How Google Works – The Google you see in your country is different from Google in other countries. There are a few factors that decide which content Google shows for every query.
It all comes down to user intent; Google’s goal is to present the right information for every search query.
A search in one country might have a different intent than a search in another country.
You can use Google Search for different countries to check how the search engine works every time you change the location.
You can do that either by using VPNs or by changing your Google search settings to a different country.
Learn International SEO – Local SEO is different from international SEO. You want to rank for keywords that have international intent rather than local intent.
For instance, when your landing pages are optimized for only local searches, they won’t appear in front of international prospects.
Moreover, you want to have a fast-loading website both locally and internationally. The use of content delivery networks can help you make your site faster even when it’s accessed internationally.
Understand How to Localize and Translate Your Content – Next, you want to make sure that your content is available in the local language of the region you are targeting.
Localizing content means taking into consideration the format, culture, jargon, and usage.
You are dealing with a target audience with different segments now. Each segment would require a different marketing approach from you.
Remember that your content should resonate with your target audience and localizing it can help you do that.
6. Localization
Localization in general just means that you take into account the needs and wants of your target local audience.
Market Prioritization – One of the mistakes marketers do is targeting too broad a market with the same content and tactics.
You want to prioritize a niche market, which can help you focus and achieve better results with your strategies.
For instance, if you are planning to expand to a whole region, take one step at a time; expand in a single country first.
Chose Vendors Wisely – One of the most important decisions you will make while expanding to a foreign market is choosing a vendor to work with.
The vendor is someone who can make or break your global marketing initiative.
Here are a few tips:
- Ask for their process
- Ask other companies about their vendors
- Find experienced vendors
- Consider working with multiple vendors
- Insist on transparency
Provide them the Information – Give every piece of information you can to your translator. It could be your product, target audience, strategy, and brand voice.
The more they know about your brand, the better.
Let’s list some of the important stuff you should provide them:
- Style guide
- Brand voice description
- Product information
- Company information
- Glossaries and definitions
- Goals
Give it Time – Expecting seamless translation isn’t a realistic approach. You want to give some time to your new translation team; let them understand your content.
Here are a couple of things you should be doing:
- Spend time with your translators and vendors
- Be patient and don’t rush the process
7. Technology
It’s time to have a look at your marketing technologies with a global lens.
Do an Audit – See which technologies your team is using and if they will help you with your global marketing needs.
Make a list of the tools your team is using and make sure the technology they use can help you grow without bounds.
Identify Missing Tools – Fortunately, there are a lot of tools out there that can make your work so much easier. Check the list of tools and see if it’s missing something.
Maybe you want a software technology that caters to all your marketing needs under one roof?
Or, maybe you don’t want everything under the sun. Maybe a simple and effective marketing tool can get your business moving at the right pace.
Budget Early – After identifying the technologies and tools you need to kick-start and grow your global initiative, you need to plan your budget accordingly.
Get quotes from vendors beforehand so that you know how much you are investing in the next year.
8. Management
Managing a team can be an overwhelming task, especially when it’s a scattered one. After embarking on the journey of global marketing, you will have to deal with:
- Multiple time zones
- Cultural differences
- Geographic distance
Empower Your Local Team – Your local team is equipped with the knowledge of dealing with local issues and growth opportunities.
Give them breathing room and let them make decisions based on their knowledge of the local market.
They know their local markets better than you, so encourage them to make local decisions.
When you feel global and local needs are competing with each other, prioritize local ones. But, don’t lose sight of global concerns and develop a strategy that caters to both local and global needs.
Boost Global Visibility – According to Deloitte, 67% of organizations have increased their social media presence. Plus, 49% increased the number of workshops and virtual events.
You want to boost your global visibility by creating a solid digital presence.
9. Mastery
Lead Your Company to Global Success – As your initiative matures, lead your organization with a mindset that “every customer matters”, irrespective of their physical location.
Maintaining a balanced internal environment should be one of your priorities. Make sure no one in your team prioritizes a specific audience.
Of course, every market won’t provide the same return, but every regional market should matter to your organization equally.
Create Global Marketing Leaders – The best way to make sure that your company stays on the path of global marketing growth is by keeping your team motivated.
Equip them with the knowledge, support, and experience that can help them become leaders in their own field.
Help them challenge their skills, but not without proper support and encouragement.
By doing all that, you will not only let others grow your company but also develop employee loyalty.
Share Whatever You Learn – Share your journey with the world and position yourself as a leader in global marketing. Don’t shy away from sharing what you learned while expanding your business without geographical boundaries.
Don’t worry about your competitors copying you; be a helpful resource for future global marketers.
By doing that, you will position yourself as a thought leader in your industry and a brand that people can follow and get inspired from.
