Global marketing is the best way to get your brand in front of an international audience, and most marketing professionals can agree on how increasingly important global marketing has become. Many businesses are looking for ways to expand their sales by including different global markets in their marketing attempts, and you can too.
Marketing professionals are working with companies who want to enter international markets by helping them utilize useful market research techniques with impressive results. Keep reading for a few tactics that are essential if you want to succeed in global marketing.
Cross-Cultural Surveys
When dealing with global marketing, it is important to address the fact that different locations will require different marketing techniques. While it is true that your target audience can likely be defined in a few demographics, your target audience in a different country will be a little different. This will require you to tweak some of your typical marketing techniques to better suit their unique wants and needs. To get on top of this change, some businesses choose to conduct cross-cultural surveys.
Cross-cultural surveys analyze how culture affects human experiences and behavior. In marketing, these questionnaires can help you examine who your target audience is across global markets and what appeals to them. Marketers use this type of survey to better understand the needs of audiences in different locations and pinpoint ways to cater to them.
If you choose this technique, the best strategy is to ask pointed questions that get down to the specifics of what you are attempting to figure out. The more direct your survey questions are, the more beneficial they will be to your market research results. These surveys can also aid in figuring out diverse consumer behaviors that allow you to increase the success of your marketing by adjusting it to their behavioral patterns.
Competitor Analysis
As you conduct global marketing research, don’t forget to look at your competitors. These are companies that sell similar products or services to yours. It is easy to be discouraged by your competitors’ successes and think that they are a roadblock to your success, but we challenge you to think differently. Understanding your competitors’ successes can help contribute to gains of your own. This is why competitor analysis is an essential research technique for a successful global marketing campaign.
Competitor analysis involves a few things, one being the ability to identify your competitors. Almost all businesses have some sort of competition, and instead of avoiding them entirely, you want to pinpoint exactly who they are so that you can look further into what’s making them successful.
After identifying your competitors, the next step of competitor analysis is to research which marketing strategies they are using to their advantage. A marketing professional can help you figure out which techniques are giving them the best results so you can model your own campaign after theirs.
For instance, if your competition is doing well using social media marketing as its main strategy, then you may want to invest more money into that technique. You can put your own flare on it, but marketing techniques are fair game to copy so long as you make the content your own.
Competitor analysis can tell you other things about your competition as well. You can gain insight into the demographics of their target audience so that you can compare them with your own audience’s demographics. You may discover they are targeting an audience you haven’t been focusing on, which could be a sign for you to adjust your focus. Since you are new to the market, this is a great way to get a foothold with new potential customers.
Trend Forecasting
Don’t just look at your competitors’ marketing data; you need to analyze your own too. To make the most of what you learn from tactics like cross-cultural surveys and competitor analysis, you need to have a thorough understanding of what’s already working—or not working—for you.
If your business has been established for a while then you can use marketing techniques such as trend forecasting to study your past accomplishments, mistakes, and more. Trend forecasting is one of the simplest market research techniques you can use. It is the process of using consumer data and market research to form predictions about how the market will perform in the future. It works like this: if you can see through market research that the first or second quarter has been slow for your business and other similar businesses, it may be safe to predict that the rest of the year will be similar.
The greatest takeaway from this marketing strategy is the time it gives you to prepare for market changes. Knowing how the market has performed in the past can help you to better plan for the future and budget accordingly. You can use this information to change your marketing techniques during times that are slower to try to compensate. You can also use trend forecasting to determine if certain competitors are struggling less than others during standard slow months. Focus your analysis on these businesses as you plan your own marketing strategy for the upcoming year.
These techniques are just a few of the essentials for a successful global marketing campaign. They should be part of a robust marketing strategy that centers on your ultimate goals. Partnering with professional marketers like InnoVision Global Marketing can help you blend the right coordination of techniques so your business can find international success.
