Learn from our mistakes! 📣
Expanding a business into any new place is a challenge. There are a lot of factors involved making it a complex and tricky move.
We have dipped our toes into new markets, expanding into DACH and France over the last few years. And with this experience, we have learned a lot about what you should do, and what you shouldn't do.
We wish expansion were as easy as replicating your existing playbooks in a new region - what’s worked before will work again right?
But we've found it's not quite as simple as that.
Here’s a few takeaways we’ve learned from our EU expansion experiences:
#1 - You’ll know there’s an opportunity to expand into a new region if you’re seeing demand (such as inbound demo requests) coming from specific regions outside your core markets without any marketing spend allocated there.
#2 - Run a small R&D test to validate before you make the leap. Put some budget behind paid ads for the region - once you hit a certain benchmark for opportunities from this small amount of spend, it’s an indication that you have enough demand in this market to expand.
#3 - Don’t assume the main use case from your core region will be the same for your new expansion region. As a data provider, one of the core uses of Cognism in the UK is for email addresses. But in DACH for example, the legislation is much tighter on when you’re allowed to email someone. We had to reconsider our messaging to ensure it resonated with this market. (This is where having people from this region on the ground can be super helpful as you learn this much faster.)
#4 - Have a dedicated role to own the regional strategy and data. While we do have someone who owns the global view of our demand gen efforts, we also have ‘Heads of’ for our regional work as they can live and breathe getting to know the local audience and make the right decisions based on what works.
#5 - There’s huge opportunities in getting local decision makers involved in your regional specific media machines. We invited senior decision makers to get involved in our French live events and podcasts and started conversations with accounts that we struggled to get access to before.
If you're interested in learning a little more about our experiences (the good, the bad and the ugly!), check out the blog link in the comments.
#b2bmarketing #expansion
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2wHi, I am also in Bangkok and looking forward to meeting you guys, what is your both number?