How To Maximize Your Company's Global Reach (2024)

For most businesses, expanding worldwide combines strategic planning, intensive research, and world-class marketing. Thanks to the increased availability of digital tools, becoming a global powerhouse is not necessarily beyond your grasp. With the right investment, your business can expand its reach well beyond the boundaries of a country.

That being said, getting this right — and turning a global reach into a profitable and successful business — is not easy. To maximize your business's global reach, you must increase your strategic planning capabilities, create a vision, and carry it past your country. Here are three key questions to ask to help your company increase its global reach.

What Is The Plan?

Nothing is more important to maximize your business's global reach than developing an appropriate strategic plan.

All strategic plans don't have the same format, but many have similar components. Your plan to expand internationally should include the following:

• A statement of mission and vision confirms your business's positioning as you seek to expand internationally.
• Market analysis and competitive analysis are rooted in real customer data, including income and consumer preferences.
• An in-depth analysis of consumer behavior.
• An overview of local regulations concerning operations, productions, and international marketing. Keep in mind that many countries have different regulations for domestic and foreign services, meaning that you may have to rely on local experts as you seek to expand your product into a new country.
• A plan for using and expanding available resources, including financial budgets and personnel.
• A sample timeline that lays out what you want to achieve and when you want to achieve it by.

The development of this plan will inform strategies to expand business globally.

Where Is The Market?

If a market for global outreach doesn't exist, you will have to alter your business plans or determine ways to create the market in the first place. You must ask yourself these critical questions: What market exists for your product or service? How can you expand that market? How can you access it in the first place?

As noted above, your business and strategic planning efforts can potentially help you identify this market and find ways to expand your business globally. However, you must spend time and effort identifying where this market exists. You can find it in multiple ways, including:

• Conducting intensive market studies using marketing firms that comprehensively understand this particular international language.
• Ensuring that you have staff on-hand that is either local to the country in question or has a deep understanding of this country. This team can ensure that you create a marketing message that is both linguistically appropriate and culturally relevant.
• Using already-existing data from public economic development sources. In many cases, a local economic development authority may be willing to work with you to help you identify the necessary information to facilitate your expansion.
• Paying for already-existing data from research firms can allow you deeper insight into already-existing marketing conditions.

How Will You Leverage Digital Advertising?

It used to be that opening a product line in a foreign country required the use of on-the-ground staff to find a market, identify firms, and identify potential customers. Of course, those days are long gone.. Now, using digital advertising can be critical to gauging potential customer interest.

Digital advertising can be inexpensive to test marketing messages and pull people to your website. You can use digital advertising to determine if there is an appetite for your product. Keep in mind that it will require extensive time and effort to craft a message that appeals to an international audience.

Once you have launched your plan, you'll have to determine what works and what doesn't. Dig deep into the analytics. What messages and language selections work, and which don't? Which messages will most likely increase your conversion rate, get more leads, and keep costs down? The specific data points you choose to analyze success will vary by industry, but it is critical that you take the time to conduct this analysis.

Remember that there are other specifics to a marketing effort that may be appropriate for your specific industry. For example, your business may want to examine creating a location-based marketing effort that targets based on a customer's physical location.

Partner With A Global Expert

If you seek to maximize your business's global reach, you are engaging in a long-term project that can expand your business globally. By executing this project, you can build a larger worldwide presence and drive more revenue. However, it requires appropriate planning to ensure you appropriately implement all strategies to expand business globally. International marketing is very different from domestic marketing, and you must account for any linguistic and cultural differences.

At Madison Taylor Marketing, we have years of experience working with businesses to help them make long-term strategic decisions about domestic and foreign expansion. Reach out when you’re ready.