If you’re looking to expand your business overseas, you’ll want to build relationships with your ideal international clients. Cynthia Dearin has four steps that’ll get you started.
Your ideal international clients (IIC) are the prospects that are most in need of your services, who will get the most value from your offering. They are the most likely to buy from you, and most likely to generate maximum revenue for your company over the long term.
Being able to locate and speak to those prospects depends on knowing who your ideal international client is, what problems they have that you can solve, and where to find them.
Because the global marketplace is so competitive, knowing who your IIC is and what they value should drive every facet of your international business. From the product you offer and how you work with your clients, to the text and images you use on your website, to what you post on social media, it all needs to be specifically targeted to a specific set of values and desires.
So how do you do that? Here are four steps to get you started.
- Segment the market.
Segmentation is dividing prospects into sub-groups based on shared characteristics. When you segment, you recognise differences between groups of customers and identify their needs. This enables you to offer a more personalized and targeted product, experience or message. It also helps you narrow down the number of places you look for your ideal client, because you commit to a specific industry or niche.
- Find out what your prospects problems really are.
Once you’ve narrowed down a segment, it’s time to get to grips with the problems your international prospects in that segment are facing.
A mistake that is often made here is that companies focus on problems that they imagine international prospects have, rather than taking the time to find out whether those problems actually exist. It’s an easy error to make, especially if you have a product or service that has sold well in New Zealand. But it’s never wise to assume, because people, what they care about and how they buy and consume vary widely from country to country.
- Build a value map
Once you’ve figured out what your ideal prospects overseas are struggling with, a great way of aligning your offering with what clients want is to build a value map, based on a single segment. This profile delves into the IIC’s goals, challenges and desires and helps you to get clear on what they are trying to do when they use your product, what problems they are facing and what outcomes they want. This information helps you to understand what sorts of products and services you should be offering to clients overseas, and what sort of messaging is likely to work in particular markets.
There are several ways that you can source the information for your value map, including:
·Interviews – Draw up a list of questions and call your clients and prospects directly for their input. This is a great way to get a deep understanding of what people are looking for, but it takes a lot of time and effort.
·Focus group – Running focus groups is a tactic used by big firms, and can yield deep insights into what people are looking for and how they feel about products. The downside is that they are complex to coordinate and can be expensive to run.
·Create surveys – You can survey clients and prospects using tools like Survey Monkey, virtually for free and this method has the advantage of being quick and inexpensive. The downside is that response rates to surveys are usually low and the quality of data is often lower, because the format is inflexible.
·Social media polls – Like surveys, social media polls are a ‘quick and dirty’ way of getting feedback from prospects. They’re quick and inexpensive and can provide large amounts of data, but often don’t provide nuanced insights about clients’ goals, challenges and desires.
·Commission professional market research – This can include interviews, surveys and focus groups. Professional research is more expensive than DIY research, but the advantage is that you can leave the hard work to experienced researchers who know how to find the data you need.
- Create an Ideal International Client Avatar
Creating an IIC Avatar is a great way to collate and leverage the data you’ve collected on your IICs. Ideally, it will combine the data sourced during the segmentation exercise around demographics, behaviour, psychography and geography, with the information gathered from clients and potential clients around their goals, challenges and desires. If you run your research in enough depth, these two sources will give you the information that you need to build a nuanced picture of the person, or persons to whom you should be targeting your offering.
Cynthia Dearin is author of ‘Business Beyond Borders: Take Your Company Global’, as well as an international business strategist, advisor and keynote speaker with 23 years of international experience as an Australian diplomat and management consultant. She is the founder and managing Director of Dearin & Associates and the International Business Accelerator. Find out more at https://dearinassociates.com/
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