Exporting with Strategy

Small Australian businesses will be relatively unknown overseas, so marketing your business, brand, product or service strategically will help grow your export numbers beyond that first chance sale.

So you’ve landed your first export deal, perhaps through an online inquiry or contact through a colleague or by visiting an overseas trade fair. Everything seems to run smoothly and you realise it’s time to look at opportunities to grow your exports. Enter, your export marketing strategy.

International marketing will often be a secondary process to grow your exports, according to Lawrence Potter, co-director of SME advisory firm and export specialists Incite Management Group. “From that first inquiry, if they find it could work quite smoothly, then they’ll take the next step and should start marketing and targeting and looking at other markets.”

The key to successful international marketing is to plan and be strategic. There’s no point mass marketing the same message across a number of overseas markets in the hope that something will come of it. While you might pick up a few good orders, there are some negative scenarios that aren’t worth risking.

Believe it or not, the marketing could be too successful and you could conjure up so much interest that you’re unable to service every customer. And while sometimes it can be essential to carefully select partners and customers, it could also damage your reputation, and opportunities that may have been better for the business to pursue later may be lost. “You need to target the market based on the projected sales you could handle,” advises Potter.

But perhaps the biggest danger in using a mass marketing approach is that each overseas market is very different, and regions and cities within those countries are different again. Each will have its own way of doing business, its own distribution channels, pricing structures, legal frameworks, infrastructure, and so on.

In Norway, for example, Potter says the population is concentrated on the east coast. “So I don’t need somebody who services the whole country, I need somebody who services the market from a base that’s in close proximity, ideally, to a major trading port and can execute the product.”

South America is another tricky region where the market tends to be very heavily concentrated on a city-by-city basis. “So again, we don’t want to secure X company as our total distributor for Brazil when all they do is service Brasilia,” warns Potter. “And if I’m going to the US, my biggest problem is not trying to sell my product but servicing the market on a geographical basis. There are five major geographic regions and no one distribution company covers the whole of the North American market effectively. So if you find a distribution partner over there, ask what type of sales network they have. Traditionally, Americans outsource that function to a sales agency network, so how does that affect your products? Their retail pricing philosophy is also very different. They use what is called an MSRP (manufacturers suggested retail price) as opposed to our RRP, and if you’re trying to get a consistent image, message and brand across the globe, that really affects your price-point.”

Now let’s consider how a marketing message developed in Australia may be misunderstood and could even offend recipients overseas if the correct translations aren’t used, or certain colours or images mean something completely negative in their culture.

The important thing is to understand the target market thoroughly and explore all your options in that market before developing any sort of marketing strategy. Your local industry association and related associations overseas are a good source of information on understanding overseas markets, as are government agencies such as Austrade, international chambers of commerce, and trade promotion agencies.

While your marketing strategy and the methods used will differ between countries and regions, Potter says the important thing is to ensure that your key message remains consistent and your image and branding doesn’t change.

This principle won’t change if you’re selling goods or services, but the marketing channels and strategies deployed will differ greatly depending on what you’re selling. “The difference between marketing a product or a service is in terms of the customer experience and interaction with it,” explains Potter. “With a service, the biggest issue is that all parties are involved at the time the service is actually executed and consumed, so in some respects services can be delivered a bit more securely than products. But the benefit of selling product is being able to look at exactly how you will work with the actual customer base you’re dealing with overseas, and we may actually be able to do things like create a white-label product specifically for a particular market (which you can’t do with services), and that creates unique opportunities.”