You’ve made it – you’ve lifted your business off the ground, established a firm foothold, and taken over your local market. Now, it’s time to expand your horizons and perhaps even take on a global approach.
Global expansion is no easy feat, requiring careful thought and consideration. You’ll have to complete a million different tasks, making it easy to overlook some important things.
Here are just a few things you’ll want to pay close attention to when expanding your global reach.
Optimizing for global SEO will make all the difference
Whether you’re expanding to an English-speaking or non-English-speaking country, you’ll want to ensure your website is fully optimized for the market you’re penetrating.
After all, every region has its own linguistic nuances or specific cultural expressions that will affect your SEO and ultimately impact your search engine results page ranking. Not to mention, they’ll also affect your overall marketing approach.
In all likelihood, you’ll need to create domains for every country you’re expanding to and then optimize every website you’re in charge of. However, remember that if you take the manual approach, things can get pretty expensive pretty quickly.
Generally, it’s in your best interest to use machine translation and simply translate and edit the content you already have published on your primary website. Otherwise, you’d have to hire new content marketers, copywriters, editors, and more who can create country-specific content for you, which can easily eat away at your expansion budget.
Localizing your products/services could be the key to your success
Of course, simply translating your current website content and using the same marketing approach for all regions you’re trying to expand to won’t be enough. If you want to succeed, you’ll need to thoroughly understand your specific target audience within the market you’re penetrating.
You’ll need to determine their unique wants and needs, assess the local competitors, and consider the whole culture when building up your marketing strategies.
Even if you’re expanding to regions with the same native language as your own, US to the UK, for instance, or even Kentucky to California, you’ll need to customize your approach to ensure you’re “speaking” your target audience’s language.
Ideally, you’ll want to plan a business trip to the region you want to penetrate to learn more about its cultural nuances and gain a better understanding of the market.
Your global plan could make or break your business
Although all operations might be going flawlessly on your home turf, that doesn’t necessarily mean your business is ready for a global expansion. Do you have a concrete plan? Do you know how an expansion would impact your current operations and workflows? Do you have an accurate approximation of the expenses you would encounter along the way?
When preparing for a business expansion, whether it’s to a neighboring city or on the other side of the world, it’s best to treat it like you were starting from scratch. Develop a comprehensive business plan.
Consider the changes you’ll need to make to your current operations, learn about the market conditions in the new region, and find out as much as you can about the potential direct competitors. Determine how you’ll structure your business and whether you’ll immediately hire new talent or send some existing employees abroad.
You might want to consult an experienced business advisor, as they can make the transition to global markets as smooth as possible.
Don’t test the waters without first familiarizing yourself with laws and regulations
Perhaps most importantly, before expanding, you’ll want to be thoroughly familiar with all the relevant laws and regulations that will impact your business abroad.
Every country has unique laws you’ll need to comply with, whether we’re talking about tax, data protection, land use, or anything in between. Even product packaging regulations might be completely different from what you’re already used to.
Overlooking even the smallest thing could result in hefty fines for your business at the least, and complete and utter failure in the market at worst.
Make sure that you have a team of experienced legal professionals around you who can help you navigate the new market without obstacles.
Final thoughts
Maintaining the status quo when your business is ripe for expansion is rarely beneficial. If you currently have a stable business structure in a profitable environment, expanding to new markets can usually be exceptionally lucrative.
However, that’s only if you do things right. Therefore, familiarize yourself with your new target audience, their language, and culture, and learn as much as you can about the entire region.
Optimize your website(s) for global SEO, localize your products and services, and create a comprehensive plan that will drive your success. Moreover, don’t forget to review all the laws and regulations you must comply with to ensure success.
