In one of my last posts, I covered the 6 things NA Marketers Need to Know When Marketing Internationally. We received great feedback from our readership on these tips, so we’ve decided to do a deeper-dive into each point – to answer some of the questions we’ve received, and also to provide a clearer picture into best practices that, when put into motion, will ultimately result in better ROI from NA Marketers’ International marketing efforts.
In the first part of this series, we will be looking at why size matters when marketing internationally. If you remember, we used the comparison that Australia & New Zealand (ANZ) is roughly the same size in population as the state of Texas. This gets even more complicated when you start applying filters, such as company size. You wouldn’t market to just Texas with a large company size filer, right? So why would you implement that strategy in ANZ?
Two things to consider about how country size can impact your go-to-market strategy
#1 – Physical size of the country you’re looking to target
In the example below, we see that Germany is tiny in size when stacked up against the United States. With a size difference that drastic, it’s just not physically possible that there would be a comparable number of companies to engage with in the German market. And this is true of many of the countries NA marketers are trying to reach.
#2 – Actual population of the country you’re looking to target
The US is the third largest country in the world by population, which means the international countries you’re trying to market to are inevitably going to be smaller. And a smaller population = a smaller audience to market to.
To illustrate this, the visual comparisons below show how countries can size up against regions NA marketers might be more familiar with. Similar to the ANZ/Texas
comparison, you’ll see below that many of the other countries marketers want to target can stack up to areas in the US in a similar way: France is comparable in population to
California and Texas, the Netherlands stacks up pretty evenly against just the New England states, and Switzerland has roughly the same number of people as the Greater San Francisco Bay Area.
These are entire countries that have a population equal in size to just a small handful of states in the US. In addition, every country has a different culture – which means their markets and buying habits are different, too. And then things get even more complicated when we start adding filters to the mix.
With all of this in mind, it becomes pretty clear that your international GTM strategy should not be the same as your GTM strategy in North America. That is not to say that you
shouldn’t be in market internationally – these regions have thriving markets with audience demographics that suite the needs of almost any marketer. Instead, simply consider how you go to market in these regions. We’ll cover off on some more of those best practices in our next posts, so stay tuned!
Sources:
US/Germany comparison info/photo credit (photo/colors were revised by TechTarget): https://mapfight.appspot.com/de-vs-usc/germany-united-states-contiguous-size-comparison
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