Increase your international market knowledge

If your product lends itself to a standardized marketing strategy, it may need little more than cosmetic changes to appeal to your overseas customers. But if you’re targeting a niche where being unique is vital to your product’s competitiveness, you may need to make more sweeping alterations—including, perhaps, a full redesign of the product.

The need for adaptation may apply not only to the design of the product itself, but also to the branding, packaging and marketing materials that make it desirable. For many exporters, the successful adaptation of a product (sometimes called localization) proceeds along these lines:

• First, you carry out cross-cultural marketing research to understand the specific needs and tastes of potential customers in the target niche.
• Using this research, you determine how the product’s characteristics diverge from the needs of the local culture, and establish what adaptations will be necessary to align them with these needs.
• Next, modify the product and its marketing to match local needs. For example, ensure that:
  • Brand and product names have suitable meanings in the language of the market.
  • Labelling and packaging comply with local regulations and are properly translated.
  • The packaging size, weight and pricing match local preferences.
  • Overall engineering and design are compatible with the needs of the market.
  • The promotional and marketing materials do not work against cultural norms, (the use of particular colors or numbers, for example).
    
  • The promotional and marketing materials showcase the special features and benefits of the product that differentiate it from the local competition.

You can now combine the results of your market scan with your work on adaptation to develop your value proposition—that is, what your customers can expect if they do business with you. More specifically, your value proposition should tell them that:

• You understand their problems and know how to solve them.
• You provide unique benefits they won’t find elsewhere.
• You offer superior value that is tailored to their needs.

To do this effectively, you need to understand what your value proposition is and state it in terms that will resonate with customers in the context of their culture or business environment. Articulate their pain points for them and show them how things will improve if they turn to your company. Suggest why you offer better solutions than your competitors.

Once you’ve refined your value proposition to reflect what’s important to your potential customers, you’ll have a better chance of getting your marketing message across. One very effective way to do this is to build these messages around a unique selling proposition (USP).

A unique selling proposition (USP) is one of the most powerful tools for building a formidable competitive advantage in your niche. A USP takes your value proposition and puts it into language that directly addresses your customers’ problems and offers concrete solutions for them. Properly crafted, it will help your salespeople, agents and distributors tell prospective customers what you can do for them and why they should deal with you rather than the competition.

There are several ways to build a USP, but a common one depends on a four-pronged approach:

1. Tell the customer what you’re offering. 

This is essentially a summary of your overall product positioning. It should reflect your uniqueness and value to your customers.

2. Differentiate yourself from your competitors. 

The objective here is to draw the attention of potential customers to the value, quality and uniqueness of your product or service. Show why yours is superior to what’s offered by competing brands. When doing this, avoid talking about differences in degree (“our service is better”) but instead emphasize differences in kind (“no one else does what we do”). It’s easy for a competitor to negate “degree” differentiators—for example, by improving their service warranties. Unique differences, like a proprietary technology that’s unmatched elsewhere, are much harder for a rival to neutralize.

3. Identify the value you provide. 

This is what customers most want to know about. Show them how they’ll benefit if they become your customer. Will they enjoy lower costs? Higher productivity? Enhanced safety? Be sure your sales representatives are clear on the value you offer and train them to express it as convincingly as possible.

4. Prove your claims. 

This is an extremely powerful sales strategy that can transform a possible sale into a confirmed one. Whenever possible, use testimonials, case studies, performance comparison data, trials and demonstrations to show how your products are superior to those of your competitors.

Once you’ve developed your USP, you can use it to strengthen your competitive advantage in your niche and convince potential customers to become actual customers. More concretely, your USP can help you in areas such as the following:

Creating effective marketing materials

You can base several types of marketing materials on the message carried by your USP.

For example:

Answering the four key customer questions

Your USP-based marketing materials can also help your representatives answer the four key questions that potential customers often ask. These questions are:

“What can you offer me?”
The immediate answer to this is your positioning summary.

“How are you different from your competition?”
Here, your sales representative explains your key differentiators.

“What value will you bring to my business?”
Depending on your product and the customer, your representative may want to emphasize pricing, productivity, or some other key value.

“Can you prove it?”
Testimonials and case studies are the most convincing proof. If these are available, your representative should emphasize them.

Shaping your online presence

You can also use your USP to help design your online presence. For example:

• Your website should reflect both your company’s value proposition and your USP. Ensure that your content aligns with both of these. Keywords and metatags should help search engines draw your ideal customers.
• Your customers will also expect to find you on social media platforms, such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn. Do some research to find out who your audience is and which media platforms work best for you. Your presence should reflect the perspectives of your value proposition and USP.
• Moving to an e-commerce platform—possibly as a supplement to your existing business model—can be a very rewarding strategy. It can expand your customer base into new markets, make you more visible to international customers and reduce your marketing costs. As with your website and social media, your e-commerce presence should reflect your company’s value proposition and your USP.