Lately, your business has seen fantastic results on the market, so now you’ve decided that it’s time to take your business global. You want to reach new customer bases, expand your reach and improve profit margins. You are visualizing your company as a global force around the world. This is the type of goal that all businesses should be aiming for in a globalized market. There is nothing stopping you from bringing your company to the next level, selling to the masses. However, before we look at how to do this, we need to make sure that you have the right set up.
There are a few things you need if you’re going to start selling worldwide. The first and perhaps most important is a plan for logistics. You need to make sure that you can transfer your goods and services to different locations around the world without your costs becoming too severe. If the costs are too high, this small area of your business could end up costing your company an absolute fortune, so this must be controlled.
You need the right tech too. It’s important that you can connect to the different areas of your business around the world, providing the best and most efficient service to your customers. If you can’t do this, you will quickly be beaten by the competing companies that can.
The third factor to take into consideration is a strong online presence. When you start to look at a global market, online forms of promotion become more important. Rather than ensuring your business is trending locally, you need to ensure that it is popular worldwide and there is an international buzz surrounding your business.
This brings us to a critical area of selling worldwide. It’s all about the marketing. You have to make sure that your business is in the spotlight and seen by the masses online and offline. So, let’s look at how you do this, examining different areas of a marketing campaign.
Go Viral
Look at Youtube, Twitter, and other social media networks, and you’ll see that there is a list of trending content. On Twitter, it’s possible to see what’s trending in different countries. You want to make sure that your business is at the top of this list in trending, but that’s not easy. Particularly, when you realize that you’re competing with movie trailers, funny viral videos and even hard-hitting journalism. But going viral isn’t as difficult as it might seem.
To do this, you just need to get the media on your side. As soon as you have media interest, you should be able to spread your story far enough to make waves. Any journalism professor will tell you that the news stories aren’t companies or corporations. It’s not money either, it’s people. So, if you can give your business a more personal angle, you should easily be able to gain interest from the news media.
There are lots of ways to do this, but perhaps the best would be to show a little skin. By this, we mean prove to people that your business is about more than just crunching numbers. You could, for instance, start a charity campaign or even donate some of your profits to a particular charity. That’s sure to pull on people’s heartstrings. But remember, to gain international interest you have to think big. You have to make sure that any marketing event that you set up is promoted in the right way.
Organising a viral event
It’s important to note that most of the stories that go viral online aren’t online stories. It’s something that has happened in the real world such as an event, a campaign or a random, unique occurrence. In the case of your business, you can’t manufacture a unique occurrence, but you can conjure up an event. To do that, you should be using an event promotion guide.
With a package like this, you’ll be able to run your own event without the help of a full team of marketing experts, but that’s not the only advantage here. You will also be able to create templates for emails and press releases to spread the world about your event online. But what is your event going to be based around?
Well, again, it could be all about your company giving something back to the community. It could also be something fun and creative, similar to guerilla marketing. Or, it might just be the unveiling of a new product. Remember, when you hold an event like this it’s important to connect it to social media, broadcasting it to your followers around the world.
In some cases, you might not even have to hold the event yourself. You can piggyback off an existing event. IGN do this every year at the E3 Expo. They have viral videos and live streams of the event that are released on their website and across different social media networks. This is exactly what you need to be doing, using social media effectively.
Going social
Selling globally, you need to make sure that you’re using all the resources available to you and you can start with social media. You’ll probably be spreading your capital quite thin at first, and the advantage of social media is that it’s effectively free. You can use social media to release content, and you should be doing this on a schedule like clockwork. There should never be a gap where your business hasn’t released anything. If that happens, you’re giving customers and clients the chance to forget about your company, and you don’t want that. You always want to be fresh in their mind.
As well as this, when you use social media, you want to initiate it as a tool to connect with individuals as well as the full audience. When you do this, you will show that your company does recognise the individual customer even on an international playing field. This might be a case of retweeting something one of your customers said that helps your campaign. Or, perhaps addressing any issues that they might have highlighted. Becoming a globalised business doesn’t mean that you stop thinking about the individual.
Boosting traffic
That said, there are cases where you do need to think about those numbers. Essentially, as you go global with your business your demand should massively increase, but that’s only going to happen if you can attract them. To do this, you need an SEO campaign, and when you start looking for a global audience, you need one of the best SEO agencies out there. You should be looking at the marketing firms that represent the larger companies. Only then will you have the power to take the international market by storm.
Remember, when you produce content you should always be appealing to the target customer. However, once you start looking at a global demand pool that definition of the target customer will become far broader. But there will still be unique traits that separate certain areas of your demand. As such, you shouldn’t be afraid to change your content to ensure it represents them, what they want and who they are.
This could mean including more diverse imagery or even incorporating different cultures and ideologies. If you want an example of a company that does this brilliantly, look no further than Mcdonalds. They don’t just change their content to connect to different international customers, they change their entire marketing strategy and even some of their products.
If you use this advice effectively, you should have no problem making waves on the global market rather than just being a drop in the ocean.