Expansion is one of the most exciting parts of business growth. However, new markets may be significantly culturally different from the company’s traditional customer base. That’s why a business should have a framework in place to gauge the response of the new audience before it releases its product or starts providing services in that market.
Because of the cultural differences, some of the tweaks to a product’s marketing may be minor, but in a few cases, massive overhauls need to be done to ensure that the buyers find the product attractive. To aid companies embarking on expansion, 12 members of forbes agency council explore some of the methods businesses can use to test product engagement in new markets.
Members share their best tips for testing out product engagement in a new market.
Members share their best tips for testing out product engagement in a new market.
Photos courtesy of the individual members.
Clearly define the new audience
To cut through the noise, it’s critical that we create products and services for a specific, well-defined group of people. Creating clearly-defined model audiences based on things like geography, demographics and psychographics provides the testing ground to validate new audiences via marketing campaigns featuring specific offers targeted to the new audience. – jody resnick, trighton interactive
2. Test on your toughest consumers
Test your product or service in small groups — not focus groups, but with people who will be your toughest customers, and do it on their turf. Take a lesson from politics: keep it local and relevant to the how to buy bulk phone numbers communities’ needs. Meet them where they are, whether that’s a community center, diner or the mall. At the end of the day, it’s their story, not yours. – kathleen lucente, red fan communications
3. Compare your audiences’ purchase paths
Since funnel does not exist in the new environment, the purchase path length and retention can still be good indicators of whether the new audience is the right fit. There should be an adjustment to the adoption of your product by a new audience, but beyond that, the average sales cycle and check should be within your current key performance indicators, unless you are changing the business model or the product is new. – oksana matviichuk, verizon media at zenith | publicis groupe.
Leverage hypothesis based marketing
Hypothesis-based marketing is a strategic approach to marketing that prescriptively builds roi by proposing: “if we do this marketing IE Lists r targeting, we will increase [this roi metric].” formulate a hypothesis about a variant and test. For example: “if we run social ads monday to friday, 9 to 10 a.M. For our daily planner app, we will positively increase our click-to-conversion ratio.” start small, test, verify and scale up. – edward unthank, etumos
One of our clients wanted to test where to go next with the help of influencer conversion rates. We tested for them every market in europe and found that portugal, for example, had the highest conversion rate, despite being a country with low brand awareness. They were then able to put together a launch strategy to enter the market.
