Tips For For Growing Your Business Beyond Borders

Taking the decision to expand your business beyond borders can be a long shot. There are so many factors to consider before deciding to expand to other countries. When you have finally made your decision to expand, what are the tips for growing your business beyond borders? Here are some tips.

Learn everything about your new market

You must put in a significant amount of preparation before you expand. These preparations include identifying local market needs, conducting foreign market research, and structuring a business plan while staying flexible to adjust product features and adapt to local customer needs.

Listen to your customers

You can search for potential leads on Instagram to introduce your services, and ask questions on how you could better support their growth ambitions. You want to get involved in the shaping of your business and ensure they feel they are part of the business.

Conduct research and watch carefully for opportunities

You must be able to identify the opportunity in your industry. You know there’s a wave of rapid digital penetration in today’s world, which in turn makes having an online presence a necessity–not a nice-to-have.

Consider your cultural fit

For your first international venture, it’s also worth keeping in mind your own heritage. Selecting the right market is perhaps the most challenging task in the process. Blindly investing in new markets is a huge risk. So, selecting countries that share a similar background to your home market, in terms of language or culture is essential and key.

Localise your product offering

Of course, there are still many differences between Hong Kong and Taiwan – not least of all, in terms of language. So you can’t expect to offer the exact same service and product wherever you go, especially if you want to demonstrate how much you value your customer relationships. As such, be ready to adapt your offering to cater to local nuances, whether that’s the language you use, the way you market your products, the prices you set, or even certain functions.

Hire locally

The reality is that for all your research and customer feedback, there are bound to be things an audit won’t unveil. So you need to be there, absorbing the business culture to develop a strategic plan. When you enter new target markets, you should always seek to hire locally. This enables you to gain new insights into the local competitive landscape and customer behaviour, and build networks and partnerships to navigate potential problems with greater ease.