How Google's Head of Startups LATAM Helps Brands Globalize Their Business [+Tips for Marketers]
Nike. McDonald’s. Airbnb.
What do these three brands have in common?
All three have developed a strong global presence. It’s why you hear about the Whopper in Spain, or spot Nike Jordan’s on the streets of Indonesia.
Fortunately, global marketing isn’t just for big corporations anymore — nowadays, technology has significantly shrunken the ‘cost per entry’ when it comes to developing an international brand.
With social media and search engines closing the information gap between countries, I’m willing to bet some international consumers have already stumbled across your business’ website.
But the question remains: How can you properly market and sell to international audiences? And how can you ensure product-market fit with communities outside your own?
To investigate how startups and small businesses can scale their marketing efforts for a worldwide audience, I sat down with André Barrence, Head of Google for Startups LATAM.
Keep reading to learn Barrence’s tips for how startups can effectively sell to international audiences.
Let’s dive in.
4 Tips for Globalizing Your Marketing Strategy
1. Start with an understanding of your global user.
When developing a global brand, you want to start by identifying the most important factor: To whom are you marketing?
Your user(s) might vary in preferences or lifestyle from country to country, but their challenges — and how your product can meet those challenges — will remain consistent cross-globally.
In other words, how your product can help a user in the U.S. likely mirrors how your product can help a user in Europe or Asia.
As Barrence points out, “What is always a good first solution is to start understanding who your user is, and who your user is everywhere, you know?”
Barrence adds, “I think that startups begin building a product with a specific user in-mind — and startups operate on this idea of serving on a match need, or serving some particular challenge that hasn’t been sold yet. And I think the beauty of technology is that you can basically serve the entire world at this point.”
At this stage, using highly effective analytics tools is key to ensuring you understand your global target persona.
Additionally, you’ll want to use data to determine which region(s) seem most interested in your products or services. This information will help you select a few countries for which you want to create a targeted, localized marketing strategy.
2. Figure out which stories appeal to different audiences globally.
While your product might serve the same needs across the globe, the stories you tell to highlight your product’s key benefits will vary significantly.
As Barrence puts it, “Once you’ve formed a hypothesis on who your user is and why they’re searching for your product, you’ll want to build a marketing strategy that is locally relevant, because the worst experience is when you’re trying to solve for a local need of yours, and for something you’re facing in your own country — but the product that you’re searching for …read more
Source:: HubSpot Blog
