Expanding your business across-borders: what to keep in mind?
It’s a well-known phenomenon: local organizations become successful and conclude that they want to try their luck elsewhere. In all their enthusiasm, board members assume that it will be just as successful as in their current situation, but they forget that it’s not easy to do business in another country. They may have their head in the clouds, but the key is to keep your feet on the ground. That’s why this article will discuss some of the most important factors to keep in mind when you expand your business to another country.
- Culture
One of the key things to keep in mind when you’re moving your business abroad, is the culture of your destination country. Everyone knows that a new culture can differ from your own culture at home, but it’s important to respect everyone’s culture, whatsoever. When not treating every culture in the same respectful way, businesses may lose customers and that’s never a good thing. Another thing to think about is your brand name: will it be equally successful as in your home country, or do you need to change the brand name? Many brands have decided to work with different brand names in different countries (e.g., Lay’s in the Netherlands is called Walkers in the UK), so it could definitely be something to think about.
- Adapt to the market
Another important thing is to adapt to the new market. That means that you need to deal with new competitors, different customers and different external parties like the government and unions. This requires a certain change in mindset and preparation before moving to another country.
- Marketing
Even when your marketing strategy is already working optimally in your own country, that doesn’t predict anything for how it’ll work in another country. You’re going to need to perform international market research in order to create successful marketing campaigns. Take another look at your target audience and their presence in the new country; evaluate slogans and their meanings and maybe even employ an expert to make sure that everything is executed well. This could save you from irreversible damage.
- Language
Last but definitely not least: language. When trying your luck in another country, you most likely need to change the language of your entire website. That means that you’ll need to translate your homepage, all of your product descriptions, but also your social media pages. Imagine that your store has over 1,000 products and you need to translate all of their descriptions, plus the rest of your website. That would be an extremely time-consuming task to perform manually. Moreover, it would be sensitive to mistakes since it’s such a monotonous task.
Automating solutions
Luckily, there are some software solutions that are able to translate text in a quick and qualitative way. PowerText.ai is such a tool: it uses artificial intelligence to generate the best translations for your business. You can also upload your own business-specific dictionary to make sure that the tool translates your texts in a business-specific way. By this, you save lots of valuable time and money that would otherwise be spent on manually translating. “But Google Translate also works fine” may be an argument to translate separate words, but if you want to translate entire texts with business-specific language, Google’s outputted texts will not be of sufficient quality to incorporate them on your website. You want to provide your customers with high-quality product descriptions to let them decide whether or not they want to buy a product. PowerText.ai is the perfect tool to translate your existing product texts into multiple languages at the same time. Don’t have any product descriptions yet? Or do your current product descriptions need improvement? Then PowerText.ai may be the tool you’re looking for. This tool uses smart algorithms to generate unique and qualitative product descriptions based on product features delivered by your suppliers.