Guest author Simon Lawrence (pictured below) tells how to take your B2B proposition into a fresh marketplace.

Sick of battling in an overcrowded marketplace for a slice of the same pie as a million other competitors? You aren’t alone. As budgets across many industries have been squeezed tighter and tighter, businesses are looking further afield to reach new audiences and increase sales – and taking products into new markets is an obvious and attractive looking proposition.

Increasing numbers of businesses have now recognised the importance of reaching out across a broader region and have set their sights on European and global markets.

Exporting a product or service relies heavily on method, finance and determination. Building in enough time at the beginning of the project to create a sound business plan will pay dividends in the long term.

Foreign markets
To operate in foreign markets effectively, there are a number of important areas businesses must first address. Thorough marketplace research is imperative when considering a move into a new region. Businesses can’t afford to get carried away with the idea of expanding overseas and blind themselves to the inherent risks.

A good starting point is to first understand the business landscape in each country: in terms of size of the business universe; broad characteristics of the businesses; a view of the level of sophistication, business culture or adoption of direct marketing; and importantly, the infrastructure to support direct marketing.

For example, Greece has approximately 120,000 businesses. But this only gives the broadest quantitative view. So, of those 120,000 businesses, you would need to determine how many relate to your specific service or product and would therefore be potential prospects.  While 120k businesses may seem to represent an interesting opportunity to a mobile phone company, as many of them will be small and focused on tourism, communications companies may want to prioritise other markets first.

Approaching local government, chambers of commerce and other business resources can help gather information on the size and characteristics of various markets.
Data suppliers like Dun and Bradstreet can help to validate that – and you can also quickly check how much generic data you might be able to find.

When you begin your launch, issues such as the language barrier will emerge. Many non-English speaking organisations have the resources and are happy to do business in English. However some don’t and culturally won’t welcome you calling and trying to speak to them in a non-native language, even if you are trying to buy.
Another hurdle many companies will then have to tackle is the likelihood that they will have relatively low brand awareness at launch.

Although there are ways to combat this, such as partnerships with established brands to add recognition and trust, this will not work well for all companies. Businesses can struggle and lose money very quickly if their uptake in a region is overly slow, so to help support overseas strategy it is imperative to build relationships with experienced and knowledgeable suppliers and partners.

These relationships can assist in ironing out initial hiccups, enabling businesses to get on with making money.  However, establishing and developing relationships with the right suppliers and partners can be a lengthy process and must not be rushed or overlooked.

Accurate data
Businesses would be wrong to assume that every country – even all those in Western Europe – have good sources of accurate and well-maintained data that conforms to similar standards and address structures as they are used to.  Finding the data you need for a European or global campaign can be time consuming and problematic, with some countries – like Greece, Cyprus, Switzerland and Austria – being particularly problematic.

Knowing there is little or poor quality data does not mean businesses should rule out DM campaigns, but rather that they need to work around these issues to get their messages to appropriate prospects. Businesses should also set up systems to ensure data is captured from the responses, to be stored for later use.

Developed cultures
Sophistication in DM and data also varies widely from country to country. As you might expect, many Western countries, such as the UK, the USA and Australia, have highly developed DM cultures – with businesses adopting and accepting this kind of marketing as the norm. But there are always exceptions.

Some Mediterranean countries such as Greece, Cyprus and Israel, have relatively poor infrastructure so will be more challenging to work with. Surprisingly, although Portugal, Spain and Italy have data sources, the data tends to be unstructured and of a much poorer quality – possibly a clue to why legislation in those countries is strict.

Looking further afield, you should also be aware that some countries which are classed as ‘emerging markets’ appear a long way behind compared to the West, but will not have to deal with the legacy problems the West has had to overcome.

Instead, they have invested in the right infrastructure from the early stages and are therefore likely to be able to shortcut traditional development cycles and will leapfrog other countries that are currently considered as more mature.

This will clearly skew the current positioning and information that businesses are working from. Having found some data to work with – or having built your own – take advice about privacy legislation.

Explicit permission
Privacy legislation varies widely from country to country. For some, ‘opt out’ is sufficient; for others, much greater restrictions exist.

In Spain, for example, it is illegal to contact any non-customer business by telephone, fax or email for marketing purposes without first gaining explicit permission. This means writing to each individual business in advance of each campaign to do so.

Clearly, this makes collecting and collating contact data for campaigns arduous, expensive and time-consuming.

For marketers, understanding how European privacy legislation is interpreted and practised in each country can be tricky. Confusion can lead to big and expensive legal problems – which has led some companies to cease any lead generation activities while they formulate policy, to avoid the increasing levels of complaints and legal escalation.

When it comes to bringing data together for the campaigns, allow plenty of time and choose a supplier who can demonstrate a track record in managing multi-country data – it’s certainly not a commodity service and could have a dramatic and disastrous impact on your programme.

It takes experience, skilled data management, complex addressing systems and reference data sets to accommodate standards and data for each country.
It also helps to have the internal expertise to be able to understand the inputs, outputs and the peculiarities of each country.

You may also find that the data you want from a new source which you’ve taken weeks to track down has been collected and captured in local dialect, often in double byte character sets as seen in Greek and Russian. Collecting data in this manner makes sense from a local perspective, where it will be preferable to converse with prospects in their own choice of language, but makes it much harder to manage, de-dupe and match with other existing prospects or customer data sets.

Global scale
With any project on a European or global scale, the layers of complexity multiply quickly and there are obviously a large number of considerations and check points before letting the campaign go live.

However, the benefits of not relying solely on one economy and allowing your products or services to reach a much wider audience can be substantial.
The best advice I can give anyone thinking of crossing borders with their campaign is to do your research, work with experts and have a plan, but be prepared to adjust it if need be.

Simon Lawrence is CEO of insight–led B2B marketing company, Information Arts.