This guide outlines background and strategies to pursue international business expansion successfully.
If you want to grow your business, you’ll eventually want to look beyond your community. For small businesses, this can be as simple a step as opening a second location in the same city. For businesses with a bigger scope, it can mean jumping borders to sell internationally.
Growing internationally is a difficult step that many businesses fail to take. This is simply because they expect their audience to remain the same. Yes, people are very similar from country to country, but cultural attitudes, trends, and even the tools they use will change. That’s why simply copy-pasting your current business model to a new market almost always fails.
Overview: international business expansion
You need to adapt your company to reflect the cultural attitudes and expectations of every new international business expansion market. However, you’ll need to adapt your business without compromising on what sets you apart.
This is a delicate line to tread, but with this guide, you’ll know more about expanding and what to do to avoid common mistakes that could hurt your chances of successfully growing your business internationally.
The Two Types of International Trade
As a business, you can cater to an international customer base in two ways. The first is to offer international shipping. This is the simplest and most budget-friendly approach to international business expansion, but it has its limits.
You’ll make overall few sales from your international audience since your business doesn’t have an established presence. Some people may be happy to buy products from a company overseas, but most won’t. They want the comfort and safety that comes when dealing with a local brand (even if it’s foreign-owned).
The second international business expansion strategy is to create a visible presence. Creating awareness doesn’t have to mean opening a physical store. Instead, you can grow your business by selling your product lines through local and global retailers.
If you are a fashion brand, for example, you can get your clothes sold at different department stores or boutiques and start growing a following. You can also drive brand loyalty and demand through various offers and promotions. In this second example, know that eventually to distribute goods in other countries, you’ll need to establish a strong supply chain management system.
Accepting and Managing International Payments
One of the most frustrating parts of international business expansion is the payment system. Accepting payments internationally usually results in high fees, holds on your income, rules and regulations, and different tax laws that you must all deal with.
Add in the fact that the more locations you open up, the more you’ll need a comprehensive system to not only accept payments but manage them, and you can start to see just what a mess working with foreign currencies can become. You can’t ask your customers to pay in your currency, but you can meet at a middle ground.
Expanding Your Supply Chains
If you want to be able to serve customers quickly in international business expansion, you need new supply chain systems. You’re at a delicate moment where you have the funds and demand to expand into new markets, so it’s important to get it right.
Not only do you need to establish at least a cursory headquarters in the new country or countries you are adding to your main roster, you also need to establish new supply lines to get your product or service to your customers in a timely manner. The success of all of this depends entirely on your ability to manage an international enterprise and also keep payments moving smoothly to minimize downtime and hiccups.
There are no shortcuts to establishing a new base of operations for international business expansion, but when it comes to transferring payments, there is a new, better way.
Rather than go through traditional banks which come with high fees and can tie up your money for days, more companies are turning to crypto for business. The fast movement of funds and the lower cost of cross-border transfers is essential to managing international supply chains to serve your customers faster.
Establishing a Local Presence
If you want to be able to successfully adapt your business for a new market, you need to accept that you won’t know best. That’s why it’s so important for international business expansion to hire local experts to take the lead.
Yes, you will want to be involved every step of the way so that every change stays in line with your company’s values and efforts. Everything else, however, will need to be adapted. Your marketing approach, what you say about your company, and even your brand’s tone of voice will all need to change.
One of the prime examples of having a professional to handle the transition is when it comes to translations. Using an automated system is a terrible idea since you aren’t even likely to get grammatically correct translations all the time. You may not even want to hire a dual-language specialist in your own country as they may not know the latest slang or how to speak conversationally in that language.
Collaborating with those who live in that country, speak the language, and know what it takes for an international brand to succeed is an absolute must.
Adapting Your Business Model
Unless you have a single product or service that you have based your entire business around, you will need to be adaptable. Even companies that offer a single service, like Netflix, offer different entertainment content from country to country. Part of it boils down to licensing restrictions, but the rest will depend on what each country watches.
From adapting your service to focus more on the areas that your new customer base is using or watching to even introducing new services or products, there are many ways that you can adapt your company for each new international business expansion market.
Doing this is a must. Not every market is going to want the same things. Being adaptable is how you ensure each office succeeds on its own merits. It will also help prepare you if markets shift. A service you offer to customers in India, for example, may eventually become a hot ticket to your US-based audience.
