When expanding an e-commerce business into a new market, the first thing to do before investing in marketing your brand or products is validate the market by completing research to determine the potential demand in the market and the logistics of serving this new market. Once the market has been validated it’s time to begin marketing your business and serving customers. Here are 7 tactics to help e-commerce businesses enter new markets:
1. Google Adwords
Adwords enables businesses to display ads to users in Google’s search results. One of the targeting features Adwords provides for advertisers is geo targeting which enables advertisers to target their ads based on the user’s IP address. Using geo targeting businesses can target people in the new market who are searching for their product or service.
2. Social Media Advertising
Social media networks such as Facebook & LinkedIn have a huge amount of personal data on their users including location information, which they make available to advertisers when targeting their ads. Combined with the other targeting options provided by these platforms social media ads are the most effective way to deliver messages to your target audience in the new market.
3. Niche Websites
Markets are shaped by a local communities of businesses and customers. When expanding to a new market businesses can identify the most relevant communities for their customers and participate in these communities and look at how they can provide value for their customers through these communities.
4. Local Culture & Language
New markets will present either culture or language barriers for businesses. Businesses often ignore these cultural barriers and market their products in the same way as they do in home markets but they should identify any relevant cultural references for their industry or products and market their
Products using these references. Differences can be identified by surveying members of the target audience in the new market, keyword research and analyzing competitors.
5. Payment
Before selling products in a new market research should be carried out on the most popular payment methods used by customers and they should be implemented on the website. This isn’t an issue when expanding in domestic markets, but when expanding into international markets this can become a problem and will frustrate customers.
6. Delivery
Delivery logistics is key to enjoying success in a new market. The business should be able serve customers from the new market and provide a reasonable delivery time and cost compared to competitors in the market. This often presents a problem to small businesses who do not have the same resources as large businesses for their deliveries. Small businesses can use online courier services such as www.irishparcels.ie to book top couriers at low prices for their deliveries.
7. Partnerships
Partnering with companies in a new market is a hack for gaining publicity and new followers on social media. To identify the best partners in a new market analysis the social media profiles of companies based in this market to determine which companies can provide the most exposure. This can be done using influencer research tools such as BuzzSumo, which can be used to search all of the Twitter profiles for companies in the market based on keywords and then rank the companies based on number of followers. Once the most influential accounts have been identified you can look at opportunities to partner with them to gain exposure by providing value for their audience such as a discount or exclusive competition for their audience.
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