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If you’re a successful marketer, you may be prepared to expand your business offerings and attempt to take on more overseas clients. Expanding your reach internationally can help build your brand name and open up whole new markets for your business to thrive in. Expanding overseas will require more foundational work than a domestic expansion. Still, international enterprises can also bring in much higher revenue with a much larger customer base and margin of growth. Here are some key considerations when expanding your marketing agency abroad.
Location and Regulations
When you begin your overseas expansion, location is key to success. Particularly in marketing, you need to have a strong understanding of the competition, market opportunities, and rules for opening a new business in that location. As a marketer, you understand that various digital and in-person marketing strategies will need to be altered and adjusted depending on your location and audience. Prepare to adjust everything from the language used in campaigns to the SEO strategies to find success in foreign markets. Always conduct market research before initiating an expansion, and in the case of international developments, you will need to be prepared legally to enter and operate within that country. This legal process will require fees and other hoops to jump through before you can begin operations within the country, but once you are legally prepared, you can begin searching for new employees.
Digital Infrastructure
As you expand your business offerings abroad, you must build new websites and develop your digital infrastructure alongside your business. Dedicated server hosting is essential for any enterprise-level organization that simultaneously manages various branches and a plethora of user data. As a marketing agency, you will need to maintain an impressive and reliable array of sites for all areas of your operation. Liquid Web offers “self-managed, core-managed, and fully managed dedicated server hosting plans depending on your business and support needs.” Be sure there is consistency across your websites, and they are all backed by a reliable team of professionals who can ensure your sites are safely backed up and constantly operating at high speed. Automatic security updates, fail-safe backups, and more can help you reliably manage a network of sites and successfully operate across multiple domains and locations.
Employees and Customer Service
If you’re marketing agency successfully moved to a virtual workplace during the COVID-19 pandemic, you may be able to maintain remote operations even when expanding abroad. Hiring skilled professionals is more convenient when you offer remote working positions. As you prepare to launch your services abroad, be sure you have a solid and experienced team in the area of expansion who are familiar with both marketing strategies and what works best in their locality. Good employees with effective training can offer high-quality customer service, which is essential for successfully building your brand name overseas. Customer service and convenience are more important than ever as businesses utilize digital solutions to improve the customer experience and remain competitive. As you build your international presence, be sure you have leadership on the ground to help establish the business and troubleshoot any unexpected obstacles.
These are just a few considerations when planning an international business expansion. As a successful marketer, scaling your business and offering services abroad can open whole new markets and tons of growth opportunities, as long as you are prepared.