Selling to an international audience is a lot easier than you may think. All you need to do is build your website and brand with an international focus and then build a strong and consistent shipping and logistics solution. It may seem like a lot, but with these top ten tips and bits of advice, you’ll be able to attract customers from around the world.
10 Tips to Help You Sell to an International Audience
- Choose a universally beautiful and simple to use website template
- Use page, post, and product templates to keep your site looking uniform
- Use a professional translation management software to offer more languages
- Optimize all versions of your site (i.e., English, Spanish, French, etc.)
- Build as much of the shipping cost into the base price
- Notify customers shipping to other countries of possible import charges and taxes
- Always ship with tracking features
- Use personalization to keep your customers engaged
- Collaborate with influencers, brands, and stockists around the world
- Look into shipping solutions so you can sell from global distribution centers
Tips on How to Advertise to an International Audience
Advertising to an international audience means crafting a really strong, unique brand image and identity. It would be best if you stood out from your competition so that you can appeal to an international audience. Otherwise, there is no reason to go through the hassle of ordering something from overseas. Try to curate a unique, specific look. You want people to be wowed by you because they don’t see a brand or your stock regularly.
If you are an artist of any kind, this is fairly easy to do, as you need to find a marketing and branding aesthetic that highlights your work. Otherwise, you will need to find a strong visual look to attract audiences. Great customer service, translation features, and shipping updates will take it from there.
Top Tip: You can use translation management software to make this step even easier. What is translation management software? It’s a piece of software that helps you localize your content and manage specific linguistic assets like key terminology and writing styles.
The Importance of Collaboration
Collaboration is very important as you grow your brand internationally. You can often sell your work through stockists. These will be boutiques or online brands that are happy to buy your product in bulk, pay the import taxes (they can often claim these back as a business expense), and then work to sell your product to their local community. It’s a great way to get more customers internationally, as you can better build in shipping and import costs, and you don’t need to worry about selling those items as they have already been purchased by the stockiest, and it’s up to them.
Other ways you’ll want to collaborate is with other artists, and of course, with influencers. Focus your efforts on the countries and locations that already have shown a lot of interest in your site, as this is the best way to build on the following you have already started.
Send Your Products to Magazines and Editors
Magazines are always looking for content, and it can never hurt to send your products to a magazine writer or editor to see if they will be happy to showcase your product in their next post. It’s simple to do (send them a link, if you can’t or don’t want to send the product), and it can help you massively when it comes to growing your business.
