Our 4-step plan for effective market expansion

Marketing on an international scale offers no standard approach, as it entails facing diverse challenges, cultures, environments, and partners. As such, running successful campaigns may appear daunting, but it’s far from impossible.

Arming yourself with prepared solutions to grasp the larger picture and measure performance across multiple markets equips you for global campaign optimization. We’ll illustrate this by sharing our experience with two contrasting clients: an established corporation in need of a marketing overhaul, and a fast-growing start-up venturing into several markets for the first time.

Our approach with each client varied significantly due to differing goals and priorities. Start-ups primarily aim for growth and new leads, while established corporations focus on enhancing operational efficiency. Despite the varying client profiles, a shared strategy worked for both. The key to success? A mindset centered on partnership and value creation.

1. Business View and Research

First and foremost, understanding a client’s company and its operations is crucial. The aim is to recognize the global value proposition and explore ways we can enhance the effectiveness of all operations.

Data visualization would have benefitted both clients. We developed a comprehensive dashboard that provided a novel perspective on their operations, capturing global activity.

We also prioritized security, implementing custom protocols to protect their accounts and ensure data safety. This proved to be invaluable in an age fraught with cyber threats.

Next, we addressed budgeting for all marketing campaigns. As projects and activities multiply, monitoring expenditures can become challenging. That’s why it’s vital to manage funds allocation in each market, allowing smart investments and adjustments, particularly when performance is low. A consolidated budget for the entire operation is an effective solution.

2. Data Management

Proper data analysis is essential, without which digital marketing becomes a guessing game. We introduced a comprehensive dashboard to make each project and campaign intentional and successful. The dashboard allowed us and our partners to compile all available information in one place. Centralizing data facilitates the development of universal solutions to all ongoing operations.

We also took care of global tag governance, standardizing tags for use across multiple countries irrespective of the campaign type. This enabled efficient data processing and simultaneous handling of Google Analytics for numerous countries.

3. Channel Management

An essential prerequisite for targeting multiple markets is effective channel management. The global expansion calls for automation, enabling quick changes and equally swift results.

For our clients, we automated several elements, including copy changes (made live on the website via Google Sheets), graphic assets, budgeting, dashboards, landing pages, and reporting. With these fundamentals covered, marketing management across diverse channels and markets becomes relatively straightforward. The primary requirement is analytical acumen, essential for extracting valuable insights.

Standardization of naming conventions and tags significantly improves channel management. Being able to compare data across all channels simplifies identifying problem areas and successful ones. Standardization provides the necessary perspective or “bigger picture” for managing international campaigns and projects.

Creatives

Our engagement didn’t stop there. We helped adjust creatives for different countries, aligning them with local cultures. We developed a dashboard that enabled real-time monitoring of all creatives’ performances. This facilitated performance tracking per country and the potential to scale creatives if necessary.

We had been working on a developed creative testing process, analyzing data from each country, each campaign, and each creative. This process made it possible to gather conclusions on each country’s creatives’ performance, which helped us scale creatives in each country based on data. This ensured we weren’t investing the budget in the same creatives for all countries, which might not have worked similarly in every country. Creative testing and focusing the budget on the creatives that worked best, and/or had the biggest potential to perform well, based on the analyzed data, made sure that no advertising budget was wasted on low-performing creatives.

We also helped manage and scout influencers from various regions. Our focus on ensuring genuine engagement and identifying the percentage of fake followers proved to be beneficial.

We worked closely with our clients’ graphic designers, using all possible resources during our collaborations.

Client Feedback

While implementing innovative solutions is significant, did they make a real difference? Here’s what our clients had to say:

“They’ve streamlined tracking work across multiple locations and countries. In addition to effective support, they provide Google Analytics training to internal teams. We have built a strong, collaborative relationship with the potential for future growth.” — feedback from our corporate partner.

“Since we began our partnership in January, they’ve nearly tripled our customer count and reduced our cost per lead (CPL) and cost per acquisition (CPA). Their efforts significantly increased traffic for our business, more than doubling our customer base. The team at MTA Digital has proven to be reliable and trustworthy, consistently meeting expectations and continually improving their efforts.” — Feedback from our start-up partner.

To summarize, understanding the unique needs of different clients and markets, along with implementing tailored strategies and tools, can significantly enhance the performance of PPC campaigns on an international scale. By focusing on partnership, customization, and a holistic view of operations, we were able to drive success in different global markets for our diverse range of clients.

Piotr Ostapkowicz

Paid Social Manager piotr.ostapkowicz@mta.digital