International Marketing: Definition, Benefits, Examples & Strategies

It’s the start of a new year, and you’re leaping worldwide with your business. While expanding into international markets can be exciting for your growth, building a new global marketing strategy can be complex and prone to costly errors, leading many brands to play it safe. Establishing well-researched and thoughtful international marketing strategies is essential to your business roadmap.

Whether your focus is maximizing your current marketing budget or initiating something completely new, international marketing does not have to be intimidating. In this article, we’ll guide you through the basics of international audience strategies and focus on the choices you can make to stretch every dollar so that you grow your business with confidence.

 

What is International Marketing?

Simply put, international marketing sells and promotes your products or services worldwide. What comprises an effective global marketing strategy?

• Social Media Marketing
• Search Engine Optimization
• Paid Media Optimization
• Influencer Marketing
• Email Marketing
• PR and Outreach
• Community Management
• Website Development
• Lead Generation

You are right if you think that looks very similar to what you currently do for domestic marketing. Planning for international consumers requires understanding other cultural and political factors and being agile enough to adapt to worldwide economic shifts. You will need to stay on top of the international marketing latest trends in consumer behaviors, regulations in different regions, and technological advancements such as AI (Artificial Intelligence) to maximize innovation in your business brands.

At first glance, this is an overwhelming project. As a Full-Service Marketing Agency, NetShopping partners with businesses to create and execute global marketing strategies. As a forward-thinking online advertising company, NetShopping media agency positions itself as a partner in international marketing growth for clients seeking to stand out and dominate their industries.

Related content: What is Growth Marketing?

The Importance of International Marketing for Business

The entire world is at our fingertips all day, every day. International businesses that do not limit themselves to domestic markets invest money in international marketing to make high returns and take leading positions worldwide.

International Marketing plan should be an integral part of any business, whether a large or small company. Its critical tasks must be to explore new markets, increase its customer base, and create and improve brand awareness and revenue streams. Another bunch of essential goals to target are shaping global market peculiarities, tailoring marketing tools and adapting services and products to reach new customers, expanding innovation ability, and giving your business the market leader reputation.

Imagine being at the forefront of emerging markets full of potential while using cost-effective production worldwide. It’s achievable with a solid global marketing plan.

Basic Principles of International Marketing

There are five fundamental principles in global marketing:

• Understanding customer behavior through market analysis focusing on such factors as location, age, and purchasing behaviors
• Tailoring the marketing message to the specific needs and preferences of international consumers in different countries–from packaging and pricing
• Choosing the best international marketing sales channels through researching the cultural and social habits of the region and partnering with local people who can give you strategic insights
• Creating a specific marketing budget with clearly defined timelines and built-in flexibility to adapt to a new customer base
• Establishing a set of Key Performance Indicators for precise data will give you an accurate picture of your progress.

We will explore how each of these affects international business in depth below.

Factors Influencing International Marketing

What works for your customer at home will not be the best solution for a global audience. For example, B2B inbound marketing and increasing brand awareness need a different approach when used in a foreign country. Understanding those varying values, beliefs, and preferences can make or break your success.

Additionally, each country has its own set of laws and regulations regarding business operations, such as brand advertising and product labeling standards. Marketing teams must consider all this, as creating different versions of your existing campaign or products can add up quickly without proper research and planning.

Understanding these elements and your target audience’s purchasing power and needs will inform your pricing and product positioning for when you enter a new market.

Advantages of International Marketing

There are a multitude of benefits to taking your business global. It allows you to tap into new markets and create a broader customer base, leading to increased sales and innovation that otherwise might be years later. 

Global marketing also provides risk management and the opportunity to diversify. Rather than relying on a single market or region, expanding to other countries can minimize the impact of economic or political instability. 

And it does not mean starting from scratch, either. Something that may have outlived its usefulness in one area of the world might be what another location is searching for, and you can supply it.

If you want to elevate and grow your brand, taking the next step is clear–it is time to expand into international markets. 

Examples of International Marketing 

In 1986, The Harvard Business Review pointed out, “The big issue today is not whether to go global, but how to tailor the global marketing concept to fit each business and make it work.”  More than thirty years later, it remains the crucial piece of the International Marketing puzzle. 

A great way to illustrate the importance of international marketing is with a few examples from top global brands.

Dunkin Donuts isn’t just for breakfast anymore–in South Korea, you can also pick up a jalapeno sausage pie with your kimchi stuffed donut. Thanks to some intelligent market research, Dunkin tweaked its menu, keeping its grip on the global coffee and fast food scene while pursuing new tastes for existing products.

Everyone knows Airbnb has changed the travel game by giving customers an immersive experience for their holidays rather than stodgy (and often expensive) hotel brands. But this barter system has also created an international audience where you can access detailed profiles, pages of honest reviews, and a user-friendly messaging system. Airbnb has made that sense of trust and safety, benefiting hosts and travelers alike.

Microsoft successfully created Bing, a powerful search engine to rival the dominance of Google. It wasn’t quite as lucky when translating their actual name upon entry into a new international market, China. According to The New York Times, the Mandarin character for the product name translates to “virus,” not something you want to see pop up on your screen. Microsoft could pivot and find a close second–Bi Yang, which translates to “respond without fail.” 

How to Create a Strategy for International Marketing

An international marketing strategy is not a one-size-fits-all solution. Some regions may require a new look, while others might benefit from partnering with local businesses or international sponsorships. Resources such as a digital marketing agency can shorten the learning curve and act as a compass, letting you explore without getting lost. 

To illustrate the significant components of an international markets strategy, let’s go through the steps that comprise an international marketing plan’s backbone. 

Conducting Marketing Analysis

Marketing Analysis is the foundation of your international marketing strategy. Getting to know your international customer in-depth is an essential first step. You can see where to begin and increase your efforts by analyzing market trends and consumer behavior. 

• Explore your target audience, their needs, preferences, and income.
• Determine the niche your product or service can fill.
• Research cultural and language standards to adopt your international marketing and sales approach to avoid unnecessary pitfalls.

Defining the Target Audience

It is vital to strictly follow every step of your international marketing process in the right order to come closer to your target audience. The first step is to collect this market data and analyze it thoroughly. After this, you will be able to find and shape your target audience. The next step is finding an effective tool to connect and communicate with the right customers, offering the products and services they need. Effective communication will foster your brand awareness and build trust to drive your profits ultimately. All these preparatory steps are the strategy’s most crucial tasks to do.

• Identifying and understanding this specific group of customers will give you a precise path to follow when creating your messaging. 
• Funneling this data into easy-to-understand graphs or charts can allow your international marketing team to see who and where their customers are, what they prefer, and what they will be interested in purchasing. 
• Knowing your target audience will inform your investments in international marketing channels more efficiently, allowing your budget to go further.

Choosing Optimal Marketing Channels

You have your international audience in your sights–but how can you be sure they are seeing you? Choosing the proper international marketing channels to invest in requires mixing the right certainty (selling where they are already consuming) and risk (identifying the latest thing before the competition does). Leveraging the best international marketing channels keeps a steady stream of B2B demand generation marketing flowing for prosperous brands.

• A younger demographic might prefer TikTok to Instagram, or a more rural region without reliable internet is better served by partnering with local businesses. 

Find out more: Mobile App Marketing Strategies

• Cultural and political dynamics can influence the effectiveness of one marketing channel, so you need compelling data to pivot successfully.
• Mixing short-term marketing, such as Instagram Reels, with longer-term efforts like SEO can diversify your international marketing portfolio and help you avoid financial risk.

Developing the Marketing Budget

With these components in place, your business can develop an international marketing budget. Bringing in your financial partners for their insight will be essential, and having an experienced digital marketing agency to guide you through the international marketing process is helpful. The marketing budget is the meat and bones of your plan, so the more support you can get, the better.

• Setting financial targets and timelines gives your business a list of priorities, eliminating scope creep.
• Companies with a sound budget can boost their ROI (return on investment) more quickly.
• Managing spending using up-to-date market insights allows your strategy to remain flexible and withstand market fluctuations.

Establishing Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)

You can’t manage what you don’t measure. Every profitable business aimed at international marketing uses a variety of Key Performance Indicators (also known as KPIs) to evaluate the effectiveness of their international marketing strategies. While you can get great intel from a long list of data points, a few are critical to your success when calculating international consumers.

• Sales growth, or how much of your total revenue was influenced by your marketing strategy
• Social media reach and engagement rate, which shows you a lot about the content your audience responds to your brands and help you plan efficiently
• Cost of customer acquisition, so you can gauge how much it costs to acquire each customer, helping you to decide what efforts are worth the money and which are holding you back.

Once your International Marketing game plan is in place, you’ll feel ready to jump into the global scene and confidently expand your business.

The Most Effective Channels for International Marketing for 2024

In 2022, Hubspot surveyed over 1200 marketers and asked them if they agreed or disagreed with the statement: “Marketing has changed more in the last three years than in the past 50.” A startling 80% of those marketers said it had. 

Such newcomers as voice assistants (like Alexa and Siri), AI (artificial intelligence), and VR (virtual reality) shift the landscape of international marketing even further into the future. Having a versatile strategy to grow product awareness is crucial to be at the leading edge. 

Let’s explore our favorites here.

Social Media

Social media continues to be the most natural international marketing way to befriend your customer where they spend their time. Most social media platforms allow you to build authority in the marketplace by posting free content in static images, stories, short videos, and captions.

The most famous International social media channels are:

• Facebook
• Instagram
• Youtube
• WhatsApp
• Kuaishou
• TikTok
• Snapchat
• Weibo

Considering international marketing, it’s essential for these social media apps to present their content to audiences differently and require a custom strategy based on your target audience research. Each forum has a unique user base, allowing innovative international businesses to create connections and promote products casually. Social Media maintains its dominance as the most cost-effective form of marketing when deciding to go global.

Search Engine Optimization 

Commonly referred to as SEO, Search Engine Optimization uses targeted keywords to surface your products when potential customers seek information online. While less glamorous than social media, SEO is vital to your brand’s visibility and international marketing as a whole. 

According to SEO research by Backlink, the #1 ranked organic result on Google is 10x more likely to be clicked on than the #10 result.  While many search engines are in use for international marketing worldwide, they all operate the same way, using “bots” to crawl the web, looking for new and updated pages. When an international consumer searches for a name or term, the search engine determines which pages are the most relevant and sends those along as a result.

Here is a short list of where you should optimize your SEO on your website:

• Page titles
• Meta descriptions
• Subheadings
• Website content, such as blogs
• Images
• URL’s
• Link anchor text
• Social Media 
• External business directories 

SEO does not show its benefits for international marketing immediately, which can sometimes frustrate businesses eager to see results in a new market. The upside is worth the wait, as ranking higher in internet searches will lead to greater brand recognition and trust.

Online Advertising

While your other channels will bring organic (or natural) traffic, many paid advertising platforms can accelerate your international marketing and global business strategies. 

Also known as a PPC or Paid Per Click strategy, this integrates the keyword research from your SEO efforts with various online channels (video, display, social media platforms) to create specific audience engagement.

By using paid online advertising, you will receive more visibility in search results, and customers are 50% more likely to purchase when they click on a paid advertisement. 

Paid online advertising is available from all major social media networks, search engines, and stand-alone deal websites to maximize your international marketing outcome.

Partnership Relations 

In many growing markets, doing things in person can yield valuable results. It’s easy to forget the power of using the local community to grow your international marketing. By collaborating with competent and intelligent foreign partners, your business can get a ‘boots on the ground’ approach to connect with your customer base, benefiting from the trust those partners have already earned. 

This international marketing approach also works when planning joint promotions or international sponsorships, such as Coca-Cola and the Olympic Games. In 2016, the soft drink titan launched a year-long campaign named #ThatsGold, aimed at teens and young adults in Brazil. The campaign celebrated life’s big and small moments as attainable and ‘gold’ for everyone and received more than 30 million video views while it ran.

Language Localization 

As you saw in our Microsoft example above, sometimes even the catchiest name can get lost in translation. That’s why prioritizing product localization is extremely important when entering the international marketing world. 

Language localization mistakes might appear in the scripts and music in your Instagram Reels or the printing on your packaging. Even the colors of your product or logo can have unintended symbolic meanings in other cultures. The freshness and purity of white in most Western cultures can appear in some Eastern cultures as symbolic of death. 

As part of international marketing, It’s also essential to take care of what words you use, including slang or colloquial expressions, as cultural and societal trends can vary widely from region to region. Scandinavian vacuum company Electrolux, aiming to demonstrate their superior products to an English-speaking audience, coined the slogan, “Nothing Sucks Like an Electrolux,” in the 1970s. As you can imagine, it did not buy anyone a yacht.

Participation in International Exhibitions and Events

The key to establishing a solid international marketing presence is more than the words you use–it’s how you get product visibility. Being involved in international exhibitions and events brings brand awareness and can promote your products and services while allowing you to network with industry professionals. Getting in front of people at a conference, trade show, or even a music festival can not only bring you tons of targeted leads–it’s essential to establishing trust for effective international marketing.

Being aware of holidays and special events of your intended audience’s culture can help you take advantage of economic peaks that may not happen domestically—the wildly popular Singles’ Day (celebrated in China on November 11th ) exploded into the most significant shopping day in the world, thanks to Alibaba’s CEO Daniel Zhang.

That example shows how once you master your international marketing strategy, you can become talented enough to create unique events that spread worldwide. 

Media Publications

Traditional media publications may seem like a thing of the past–but targeted B2B PR plays a critical role in extending the reach of your international marketing when it comes to global expansion. Securing news media and other coverage, industry publications, and a solid digital presence accelerates your business’ growth as an authority and trusted brand.

Building these relationships ensures a direct line of communication with your target audience. 

Also, traditional media needs to have an online footprint so your products and brands will benefit from added visibility and higher ranking in search results.

Local Product Adaptation

As demonstrated by Dunkin Donuts, reimagining your product or service into something unique to your international marketing can bring great success. The most important lesson here is that it doesn’t always mean heading to research and development to start from scratch. It can be as simple as offering variations on existing products or repurposing a service that has outlived its initial market. 

Some examples of local product adaptation are:

• Automobile steering wheels are on the right in the UK and Australia and the left in the United States and Canada
• Packaging and products (materials and printed information)
• Quantities and product size to meet acceptable price points
• Features that might not be necessary or appealing to other markets

These innovations often lead to new insights into domestic and international marketing and benefit the company in the long term. 

Video Marketing

Video marketing is one of the fastest-growing international marketing channels. Indeed, video is the format with the highest ROI in 2022, according to Statista. Short-form videos (less than a minute) like those found on TikTok dominated the market share with their bite-size length and easy shareability. 

Longer-form videos on platforms like YouTube and TED talks allow brands to demonstrate their expertise, placing them as leaders in global marketing. They are excellent for educating your foreign markets on everything from your mission statement to how to use your products. 

Influencer Marketing

Influencer Marketing is the modern take on the brand spokesperson. Influencers have shown to be more effective in today’s business strategy, as they present your sales content casually and friendly, using the trust they have earned from their followers to create the same feelings for your products. 

Influencers are indispensable assets when international marketing. Countries such as Mexico, Argentina, and Brazil rank among the highest in the world for mobile device and internet usage. Local and national influencers transcend the language barrier, allowing you to gain a foothold and expand rapidly. Analyzing their social feeds and engagement statistics will give you quicker insights into what your international customers respond to. This kind of data is precious, taking some risks from your global marketing campaign.

Take Advantage of the Best Benefits of International Marketing with NetShopping

As a comprehensive solution provider, NetShopping brings international marketing expertise and a dynamic approach to elevate your products in the digital landscape. 

• Strategic Multi-channel Promotion: Our marketing agency for small businesses excels in crafting strategic multi-channel promotion projects. Our team takes care of the entire process, from social media management to SEO, marketing, and innovations, to boost your brand and reach your target audience across various platforms. 
• Creative Content Excellence: Experience the impact of creative content to drive and inspire your international marketing audience. NetShopping is a team of innovative minds willing to develop unique visuals, inspiring videos, and driving copy to make your brand story stand out. 
• Tailored Industry Expertise: NetShopping has a proven track record of success across various industries, ensuring that our strategies consider challenges and celebrate opportunities for its clients to expand their brands to global markets.
• Comprehensive Branding Solutions: Build a solid brand presence with our international marketing comprehensive package. We focus on creating a brand identity that resonates with your audience and sets you apart in the competitive market. 
• Proactive Lead Generation: Drive growth with our proactive lead generation strategies. NetShopping understands the importance of not just attracting traffic but converting leads. 

Conclusion

As we enter 2024, innovation is the game-changer for international marketing. Virtual assistants, AI chatbots,  augmented reality tools that transport you into an immersive experience, and other new approaches will be able to connect and sell to a whole new audience. No matter which road you take to scale your business, international marketing will be an essential decision to drive it to thrive.