So your business is doing really well. It seems like only yesterday that you were starting up shop. But in reality those days are far away. Your business is more successful than you could have imagined back then. But you feel like you could be even more successful. You come to the conclusion that you need to spread your wings a bit more. That your current business area has become a cage keeping you from more success. (Albeit a very comfortable cage.)
So what do you do? You expand! But you don’t just want to expand within your own country. You want to take on the international market. You want to spread those business wings and fly to new and strange territories. After all, that’s how all the really big companies really made it, right?
Well, hold on a second. Here a few things you need to think about.
Have you expanded on a national level?
This is probably what you should be doing first. Of course, this isn’t absolutely necessary. You may have demand for your particular service in a new country before you have it further across your own. But in most cases you’ll want to try out a new part of your own country. This will help you see the business of expansion on a national level. And that is much easier to handle.
The logistics of exports
Of course, expanding in this way doesn’t always mean you need to copy and paste the business to a new country. Operations may still be able to be contained solely in the place you are know. You should see this as a good thing, because exporting your product is the easiest way to “go global”. However, you shouldn’t go believing that it’s a cakewalk. You’re going to need to research a lot of factors. You need to consider the legalities concerning your product as well as import/export prices.
Lost in translation
Perhaps the silliest mistake you could make here is to allow language barriers to stop you. If you want to go global, then you need to have facilities allowing for international communication. I’m not saying that everyone in your company needs to learn a new language. You can actually get outsourcers to do such translation work for you. It is important that you look to work with the language of thriving areas, though. Let’s say you’re looking to do business in West Asia or North Africa. In which case, you’ll need to look into English to Arabic translation.
Getting the word out
Remember all that work you had to do in marketing to get to where you are now? Yeah, you’re going to have to do that again. But in a whole new territory and possibly in a whole new language! You could work with translators to work on your previous marketing schemes. But you need to consider cultural differences that could affect the efficacy of a campaign. You may want to work with a marketing agency that specializes in going global. Speak to your current agency to see if they offer such services.
