International Growth Consultancy : Why Does It Matter?

August 2023, Mylène Curie

 

The digital age is in full swing, and so is globalisation. There are many reasons for international expansion, including:

  • The selling of an established product into a new market, to grow incremental revenue
  • The exploration of new selling avenues to diversify opportunities and address market saturation
  • A push for additional visibility, particularly for niche products that struggle to ramp up locally
  • An operational move for cost efficiencies, with a view to offsetting economic uncertainty in the domestic market.

Becoming market ready is a complex, multifaceted journey, but International Growth consultancy puts market intelligence into motion and empowers you to go global. It does the heavy lifting by evaluating your market readiness for growth and providing you with actionable insights, so that time and investment can be made on innovation and strategic decisioning instead. This results in faster go-to-market times, and successful expansions further down the line.

Assessing market readiness

Growing in a global economy involves a phased approach to activity planning, building, strategising, and scaling, all of which influence the customer journey and purchasing behaviour. Each phase involves a mixture of strategic, localisation, brand building, and operational expertise. Business planning also involves the creation of timelines and roadmaps for the execution, monitoring, and re-evaluation of the determined growth ambitions.

International Growth consultancy therefore helps you understand your market readiness for growth — where to go and why — and actions needed to move to the next phase of market maturity — when to act, and how to do it — by assessing every core component of your international journey:

  • Go-to-market KPIs
  • Product resonance, seasonality, and demand
  • Competitive landscape
  • Audience profiles, interests, and behaviours
  • Channel-specific opportunities and contributions to growth
  • Localisation gaps and content requirements
  • Operational readiness, including preferred payment, logistic and customer care options in the desired market

Improving global searchability

International Growth consultancy also gives you a solid understanding of your marketing mix and competitive edge. For example, you may want to consider:

  • Social media activities, to connect with specific audiences all over the world, based on core interests
  • Programmatic advertising, to personalise creatives to users at scale
  • Shopping advertising, to capture demand across a huge portfolio of markets
  • YouTube advertising, to boost your reach and support your Brand discoverability
  • Remarketing advertising, to keep the momentum going and increase your Brand loyalty
  • International SEO strategies, to improve overall searchability

Localisation is another vital component of the go-to-market journey. Filling in content gaps and navigating cultural differences will connect your brand with your customers nearby and around the world, and ensure you always stay front of mind. Expert language services not only optimise your brand building exercise, ensure narrative consistency across all touchpoints of your international journey, and optimise the overall customer experience, they also increase your cross-channel searchability. Localisation allows you to articulate your service value offering more accurately and distribute content at scale.

Supercharging international growth

Establishing a go-to-market ‘proof of concept’, through International Growth consultancy, allows you take a truly transformative approach to expansion and address the challenges covered off below. In a nutshell, International Growth consultancy helps to:

  • Define a plan of attack — Having a data-driven and objective-based rationale for expansion, as well as a “when” and “how” mindsets, not only determine expansion feasibility and frame opportunities, but also mitigate risk, help construct relevant business strategies and validate success.
  • Futureproof success  — Ongoing and agile measurement set your business up for success. Driving transformative results takes time and requires a solid measurement framework that includes all performance, operational and linguistic KPIs.
  • Connect the dots globally  — Delivering a memorable, omnichannel experience at scale involves many touchpoints, components, collaterals, and capabilities, as well as a unified view of your end-to-end customer journey.
  • Think local to grow global  — Using market context to fine-tune content strategies makes your value proposition and product offering intelligible to the local market.
  • Address operational glitches — Creating a frictionless CX experience involves the implementation of payment methods, checkout processes, delivery options and customer support channels that align with local market preferences. Navigating under Brexit also creates a bunch of new operational challenges, all of which need to be addressed to unlock cross-border sales.
  • Deliver content at scale  — Managing and distributing content at scale means your language and localisation partners need to work as extensions of your teams and make proper use of advanced language technologies and engineering capabilities. Exploring new avenues  — such as transcreation and multilingual copywriting  — can help fill in any content management gaps.
  • Protect your digital stamp  — Finding the sweet spot between the need to align with the culture of the market in which you operate and your true business identity is vital to successful expansions.
  • Address market volatility  — Making use of automation, machine learning-based strategies and responsive ad formats, for example, helps increase your reach, capture key digital moments, and reduce volatility.

Our International Growth Consultancy specialists can support your international ambitions by assessing your brand go-to-market readiness and help you overcome strategic, operational, and linguistic blockers throughout your international journey.