By Waleed Najam, CEO NEO Innovations, e-commerce marketer with over 10 years of business experience in digital marketing and e-commerce.
You’ve built a great e-commerce website or a brand that seamlessly serves your local customers. But now, it’s time to take that success to a global audience by creating an equally smooth shopping experience for international customers. According to Forrester, global retail e-commerce sales are expected to reach $6.8 trillion by 2028, driven by factors like increasing internet accessibility and new selling channels.
Now, the goal is to replicate the best products as they are or even tailor them to meet the unique needs of different markets. You’ll need a smart, strategic approach to make this transition efficient and scalable for future expansions.
Identify The Next Market
Before launching campaigns in any market, it’s important to implement multilingual options and currency converters based on geolocations. Many CMS platforms, like WordPress, Shopify and BigCommerce, offer plugins and settings to help you achieve this. Once these features are in place, monitor the order ratio beyond your primary market.
Buyers will discover you regardless of your region as your brand grows and gains a strong social presence. Identify the country with the second-highest sales after your primary market and prioritize it based on sales performance.
Here I have extracted five proven strategies that will help you expand into your new market:
1. Establish Independent Regional Websites
Building trust in a new market starts with creating dedicated regional websites. These allow you to adapt key elements, such as the local language and currency and your design, to match the market’s cultural preferences.
Localized websites can also help boost your SEO. By using regional top-level domains (TLDs) and local languages and optimizing for local keywords, you can increase the chance that search engines rank your site highly for local users.
It’s essential to have one website, pixel and ad account for each market. These factors contribute to better targeting and tracking because customer behaviors and preferences can vary significantly between countries. You may also need to customize products and adjust pricing for each country you’re targeting. This approach ensures that you can tailor your offerings and marketing strategies to meet the unique needs of each market.
2. Partner With Local Influencers
Influencer marketing can be a game-changer for your business, as local influencers can help your brand gain trust and connect authentically with new audiences. Their recommendations carry weight because they understand the culture and preferences of their followers.
To find the right partners, research influencers in your target market using platforms like Instagram, TikTok and YouTube or databases like Upfluence, Mentoga and Grin. Focus more on micro-influencers with niche audiences—I’ve found that they often have higher engagement rates than larger influencers, especially in culturally distinct markets.
Campaigns featuring local influencers showcasing your products in relatable local contexts can create genuine and reliable connections with new audiences, turning skeptics into customers.
3. Invest In Regional Marketing Campaigns
One of the most effective ways to engage local audiences is regional marketing. Use data to understand cultural nuances, key shopping seasons and the most popular platforms in your target region.
Go with the geo-targeted PPC campaigns on search engines, website and social shopping sections (like Google’s), Meta or TikTok. Focus on regional keywords to improve relevance and search visibility. Tailor your ad copy and visuals to highlight how your product solves local problems or aligns with cultural values.
When you show that your brand “gets” the local audience, your campaigns are more likely to resonate and drive conversions.
4. Maintain Distinct Local And Global Audiences
To ensure that the ads are effective across the world, it’s necessary to consider the concept of globalization. But at the same time, your ads have to be localized to appeal to different people of different cultures. Your international initiatives could be based on a general brand image, but local campaigns should focus on recognizing the regional requirements, cultural nuances and consumer habits.
By using data analytics, you should be able to categorize your fans and followers by geography, which will assist you in creating targeted email marketing campaigns, social media feeds and promotions that are related to a certain territory. For example, a skincare company could focus on moisturizing products in areas with dry climates and promoting sunscreen use in sunny areas.
That way, you have a localized approach to your messages, which can help clients trust and value your company, while still maintaining the unchangeable core of the brand identity that cannot be adjusted for localization. It’s about remaining current without straying too far from the goal.
5. Build A Local Team
Hiring local talent is always one of the best things you can do when expanding your business into new territories. They give you a unique vantage point into customer behavior, local culture and language that can go a long way.
Have customer support representatives who speak the local language for customer engagement, content writers to produce content in the local language for your company, and marketers to give you an on-the-ground picture of how your brand is being perceived. When the customer service representatives converse in the local language and are in the same time zone, I’ve found that it’s easier for customers to trust your brand—and it is easier for them to reach out to you.
Maintain a good relationship with your colleagues to ensure that you are all in harmony with the vision of the business in the global world, but at the same time, allow them to bring changes to the campaigns that will suit the market. You may find that their local content knowledge comes in handy.
Expanding into new markets presents both an opportunity and a challenge for e-commerce brands, but by implementing these strategies, you’ll ensure you’re well-prepared to connect with diverse customer bases and thrive in an international market.
With careful planning, a localized approach and data-driven insights, your brand can gain both a global presence and the local relevance needed to succeed. In today’s competitive e-commerce landscape, this strategic expansion can help position your business for sustained growth across multiple regions.
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