The web is awash with retail business tips that will help you increase sales, grow your customer base, and strengthen your brand loyalty. However, this does get much trickier when expanding internationally. You need to balance the challenges of growing your company at the same time as you adapt what you offer to each individual market.
However, none of the great retail companies ever made it big without going global, so the rewards are obvious. At Bitrix24, we know a thing or two about retail businesses management tips, and we’re here to help you take your organization to the international stage. Our 6 key strategies for your global retail business cover structural changes you can use to maintain your brand identity, then get into the finer details of what to do once you’re in your new country.
1. Maintain your identity wherever you go
When you’re making the jump to become a global retail business, there are a lot of steps you can take to ensure your brand stays recognizable and trusted all over the world.
This doesn’t mean taking a cookie-cutter approach and applying what you’ve already got everywhere else, but certain aspects need to be consistent wherever they’re used.
Get your top writers and designers to create documents like your vision and mission, brand guidelines, company policies, and more. These can be shared on your company’s intranet for easy access and onboarding processes.
These key documents will of course have to be updated regularly, and a future step would be to adapt documents per market as you gain insights.
2. Meet your local teams in person
The more your company grows, the less control you can have over it.
One solid way of aligning your individual markets while respecting their differences is to send trusted leaders to each market. This technique can save a wide range of potential issues, such as motivation, training, and structuring.
You can use these trips to get everyone clear on your company policies, workflows, and USPs so your standards remain the same all around the world. Organize fun activity days that spread the message as well as bringing your local teams together. The distance between corporate head offices and the shop floor can feel vast, so design your activity days to make your colleagues feel closer.
Of course, this isn’t a one-way street. For a local team to work well, your international leaders need to understand their market, starting with the language. A minor investment of language classes before your regional managers travel to their countries will pay dividends in the future through trust, collaboration, morale, and insights.
3. Design specific strategies for every market
It’s easier said than done to just implement winning local strategies, but when you send your trusted leaders to their target markets, this is one of the most important aspects they can work on.
When you’re becoming a global retail business, it’s easy to think about the bigger picture as you expand. However, it’s important not to overlook your local markets. It will come as no surprise that each area is unique, whether it’s in where and how you decide to market or the style of language you use in your promotions.
Use your local minds to analyze your markets, outlining their strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats, which will help you choose the basics such as location and investment. Then, you can start looking into how to launch your social media strategies, set up your online ads, and localize your website and apps.
4. Be present in all channels
It’s the 21st century. People are too busy looking at their phones to notice your sign spinners and billboards.
As a global retail business, you need to be going down all kinds of channels to attract new customers. Social media has been the latest game-changer: a place where you can post engaging content, run competitions, post ads, and leverage influencers to boost your brand.
When you’re growing your business, it’s important to make a splash from the beginning, so a strong opening campaign is a priority. After that, you’ll need email marketing and frequent social media posts to retain interest and gather new customers, as well as a phone line in the local language.
5. Don’t be afraid to outsource
Whether you like it or not, you won’t be able to keep 100% control over your international branches, and one of the upshots of this is hiring locally. It’s certainly a more effective global retail business strategy to hire local legal minds rather than trying to learn every country’s protocols system. It’s even more effective to pay a lawyer’s wage rather than a lawsuit payout.
Among the best marketing strategies for retail business is to apply the same tactic. Workers from the same city as your new branch will have all the local references, in-jokes, and turns of phrase that will attract customers.
With tools like Bitrix24, you can keep records of all your collaborators on your company’s organizational chart, making contacts, invoices, and payments a piece of cake.
6. Feedback forms
Now you’ve got your markets set up, it’s important to give them the attention and investment they need to grow into a success. Unfortunately, there is no magic formula that will mean everything is rosy from day one, so every global retail business is a work in process.
One of the great small retail business tips is to launch online forms to get customer feedback. Sure, you’ll need an incentive to encourage your users, but a 10% discount could be the push to make an online sale you wouldn’t normally get. Win win!
From these forms, you can get direct feedback from your customers that will help you introduce new products and take your local businesses in new directions.
Now go and branch out!
Before you start charging ahead on your international mission, you first need to get to grips with the tools you’re going to be using, so register for Bitrix24 today and get started for free!
You’ll find all the tools you need to get started and there are different levels and plans so you can upgrade as you expand.
