Defining your roadmap: planning and preparing your international expansion.
01: Market Entry Strategy: What, Why and How?
What is a market entry strategy?
It is he strategy with which your business plans to achieve increased sales, brand awareness and business stability in the new market. It will set your goals, your milestones, and your roadmap along the way.
Why do you need a market entry strategy?
Once you are in the market, you will need to act fast and decisively, and the clearer your strategy has been prepared in advance the fewer mistakes you will make. It will also help plan your budget and operational roadmap for the first year.
How do you structure a market entry strategy?
The Market entry strategy should help you clearly define your sales and business development strategy, as well as the best way to support it through your marketing and communication efforts in the local market.
02: Sales & Business Development: Getting your first local clients
Which clients?
Make a short list of the most interesting clients, depending on your Ideal Client Profile (ICP), to target during the market rollout based on their industry, their size, and their location, as well as the contact details of them, in order to enter all that information in your CRM.
Which personas?
Define the buyer personas of those clients, compare them to your local market, and analyze the differences when it comes to their business focus, their expectations, and their buying process, in order to prepare your sales team.
Which channels?
Compare direct, indirect and hybrid sales approaches in the local market, and select the one most adapted based on your solution, your sector and your clients, as well as your partner network in the local market.
03: Marketing & Kommunikation: Developing your brand in the new market
Define your USP:
By benchmarking your local competitors and the needs of local buyers, validate your product-market fit, and clearly define which elements of your value proposition are the most relevant for the local market.
Adapt your messaging:
Analyze the wording and the messaging of competitors and partners in your industry in the local market to adapt your communication to the local audience by using the appropriate keywords and expressions.
Select your communication channels:
Compare various marketing channels, from social media to events, list which ones are used by competitors, assess their impact on your target audience, and select those most suited to your needs.
04: Resource plan and action plan: Managing your first year in the local market
What you will need: Resource Plan
Assess the impact of the market entry on your business by listing the required resources in each business function over the first year. Based on this you will be able to decide how many additional resources you need to invest to succeed.
- Legal team
- Marketing team
- Sales/BusDev team
- Logistics/Operations
- IT/Security
- Others…
What you will do: Action Plan
Clearly define a roadmap for the first year, with ambitious but realistic milestones for each business function. Set clear KPI’s and objectives to check the progress once the market entry is launched.
