Is your business consistently experiencing a few slower days every month for a significant period of time? Have its sales become leveled off? If your answer is a ‘Yes’ to any of these, perhaps it’s time to enter new markets.
However, for any company, business expansion can be risky because it brings new competitors and unexpected challenges. But if you take the right approach and use the right strategies, you can minimize the risks of entering new markets to a good extent.
Here, we’ve rounded up some effective strategies that you may want to consider.
Define Your Goals
First and foremost, you should be clear about why entering a new market is a better option for your business than the extension of existing markets or new product development. Once these things are clearly articulated, you can start determining your goals.
Your business goals should be both measurable and reasonable and need to include both short- and long-term success. You need to decide on things like the timeline to set your business to enter the market, timeframe to scale, how much market share should be enough for it, and how it’ll gain that market share.
Understand the New Market
It’s simply a must to understand the new market and your business’s existing offerings in relation to it. Needless to say that the offerings must be somehow better than the new competitors so that your business can successfully enter the new market.
To accomplish this, it’s important to conduct customer development interviews to get a clear view of the pains and problems of target customers. It’ll help you understand whether or not you need to tweak the narrative of the products/services and fine-tune the value proposition.
You may also communicate with local businesses and businesses that have already expanded to the market successfully. It’s also important to discard any assumptions that you may have about the easy transferability of your products/services into the new market. Sometimes, cultural and societal differences may affect the perception of a business and its offerings.
Conduct Competitor Research
In-depth competitor analysis is another very important thing to understand existing businesses in the new market. Focus on developing a clear understanding of your competitor businesses, their offerings, and their value proposition so that you better understand the environment where your business will have to compete.
Once these things are clear, it’s time to modify your go-to-market strategy, products/services, and value proposition to beat the established competition. It’s important to understand that if price is the only differentiator and your business will have to invest in developing brand awareness heavily, it may be a higher risk proposition to enter the market.
Develop Brand Awareness
Once you know who the target audience of your business is and what the competition will look like, it’s time to develop brand awareness. Brand awareness and trust points are central to enter a new market successfully.
When a business enters a new market, nobody knows about it, its concept, and its products/services. This is the reason you’ve to raise brand awareness using different channels. There’re multiple effective ways to do it – from press releases, influencers, and local ambassadors to local partnerships and feedback on your business website.
You must be able to present your business to your target audience in multiple ways. Two effective ways include encouraging people to provide honest feedback on the products/services and getting recommended by a public figure.
Final Thoughts
When it comes to entering a new market, probably the last thing you should do is expecting a significant amount of sales right away. This is because the adaptation stage often takes time, and if your business hits the ceiling at the initial stage, it may hinder its growth.