Reaching International Customers: Marketing Considerations

Marketing to customers just down the road from you comes with its challenges around messaging and channels. These challenges can be amplified when you’re marketing to customers in a completely different country to you.

From one country to another, there can be differences in so much more than just language. Cultural variations, the state of the market, even working hours and how people typically spend their free time can differ.

With that in mind, just how do you approach marketing to people in another country?

We took top tips from the companies who are doing this right now:

Gianluca Atzeri, Charmingitaly.com

We are based in Italy and we are trying to reach customers across the globe, from the UK and wider to Europe, to the USA and even Australia. We’re trying to drive bookings using our websites charmingpuglia.com and charmingsardinia.com.

It’s almost too obvious to say. But translations are critical. Mistakes in translations are really problematic and can eat away at your credibility. But there’s more than that to it.

We’ve made the fact that we are based overseas from our customers a selling point, rather than a disadvantage.

We sell Italian experiences and holidays, so we are in a great position to sell much more authentic ones. We know Puglia and Sardinia like the back of our hands. We can help people create authentic experiences on their holidays, enjoy off the beaten track sights and eat amazing quality Italian meals. Being here in Italy gives us this advantage over travel agents based in the USA, UK or Australia. So, it’s important for us to sell on that point.

Faye Nash, Dancewear Central

There are so many different ways to set up sites to sell overseas. We sell a lot in France and Germany and decided in the end to get country specific web domains and build separate websites to sell in both France and Germany. So, in addition to our UK site, dancewearcentral.co.uk, we have a .fr and a .de version. This means we can localise the sites and that comes down to lots of things.

Most definitely, translations have to be completely accurate. But there’s more to consider than that. Another vital thing is payment methods. It’s a mistake to simply presume that the payment methods we use most in the UK will be the same overseas. Do your research and accept the payment methods most prominently used in the countries you are targeting.

And finally, another important consideration is that market trends could be completely different in other countries. With this in mind, it’s ideal to have the ability to merchandise individually for each territory you target.

Dhruv Nagpal. The Original Bed Co.

When starting the process and it does take some time to figure out what works and what doesn’t. We used our experience in the UK as a base to start but, of course, there is a lot to learn when it comes to marketing in the continent.

Your options – you can start selling on Amazon EU. It is a very easy way to get started for physical products. It helped us try to figure out product fit and validate our business plan and costing for selling from UK to EU.

Post on social media. It will help you build confidence in a brand and is an importantly utility to build a customer feedback. Organic growth can be slow but advertising on social media is also very powerful strategy to grow as you start in a market.

Google is a good way to advertise if it’s not too expensive in your niche. We’ve found it to be cheaper to advertise on Google in Europe than in the UK which is a big bonus for us.

A very important step is to translate your website when moving into new markets. For physical products it builds customer confidents and improves conversion rates considerably.

Ben Mosalski, Alpari.org

Alpari is a large multinational brand and, as such, we are in the fortunate position of being able to create strategic partnerships in many of the countries we market towards. Forex can be a complicated offering, so having access to some local resource with first hand local market knowledge is invaluable.

In the Forex world, there are different compliance regulations in different countries. So, it’s important for us to work with people who understand these perfectly. And secondly, the market is more and less advanced and mature in different territories. As such, the customer profile really is quite different in different parts of the world. We feel the only way, with that in mind, to understand our customer, is to have local relationships we can capitalise on to get insight.