Market Research 101 For Expat Entrepreneurs

Posted on 08. Feb, 2010 by Emmanuelle Archer in Blog, Expat Entrepreneurs
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- You’re looking for local retailers for your new product – the cutest felt hats ever – but what colours should you show them? Will their Danish customers prefer forest green, or hot pink with orange polka dots?

or…

- You need a small business loan, but you don’t have much credit history in Canada yet. How do you build a rock-solid business plan that wins over your bank manager?

or…

- You just know that your holiday resort project in Vietnam will be a success … if only you can convince that venture capitalist to lend you the funds. How do you show him that the demand is there, and that his investment will be worth his while?

The answer to these pressing questions and many, many more? Market research, my dear Watson!

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Starting A Business Abroad: One Last Thing About Your Target Market

Posted on 05. Feb, 2010 by Emmanuelle Archer in Blog, Expat Entrepreneurs
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Are you still reluctant to narrow down your target market for fear of leaving money on the table? If so, let me clarify something:

Your target market represents the people you are actively marketing to. But your target market doesn’t limit who you are selling to.

For example, my target market, narrowly defined, is people who are currently living abroad, and who are entrepreneurial- or career-minded professionals. These are the people I market to.

However, my client list also includes young travellers on a work/holiday visa, stay-at-home accompanying spouses, and potential expats who are in the process of deciding if life abroad is the right choice for them. Sometimes, Vancouverites who know that I work with expat entrepreneurs will hire me for business coaching or marketing consulting, even if they themselves have no intention to move overseas.

So I work with all kinds of people – but because I can’t be everywhere at once, I only market my services to a clearly defined group that has a specific set of challenges and needs. Makes sense?

Choosing a target market means that you focus your marketing efforts in order to achieve greater overall impact.

Once you make your mark on your well-defined market, even those who are not part of your initial target will give you their business, if your products and services meet a need of theirs.

Far from driving clients away, narrowing down your market will actually boost your business by making you more attractive to buyers, whether you’re actively targeting them or not. I know it seems counterintuitive, but it definitely works.

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Emmanuelle

Image by gordon2208, via Flickr Creative Commons

4 Reasons Why You Need To Clearly Define Your Target Market

Posted on 03. Feb, 2010 by Emmanuelle Archer in Blog, Expat Entrepreneurs
5 comments

For all the discussion about choosing your target market, you may still be wondering if it’s such a good idea. Do you really have to narrow it down?

After all, if you can get business from all sorts of folks, why would you want to limit your potential market? Isn’t that kind of shooting yourself in the foot?

These questions are perfectly valid, and you’re not the first entrepreneur to struggle with them. In order to help you make an informed decision, here are the top 4 reasons why I recommend that you define very clearly who your potential clients are.

4 benefits of narrowing down your target market (more…)

Starting A Business Abroad: How To Fine-Tune Your Target Market

Posted on 01. Feb, 2010 by Emmanuelle Archer in Blog, Expat Entrepreneurs
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If the target market that you had in mind doesn’t quite meet all the criteria we’ve outlined, don’t be too alarmed. Here are two methods that will help you move forward, even if you’re not 100% sure who you should be marketing to:

From specific to general (more…)

Starting A Business Abroad: How To Choose Your Target Market Wisely

Posted on 29. Jan, 2010 by Emmanuelle Archer in Blog, Expat Entrepreneurs
4 comments

You’ve been doing a lot of listening lately, and you have gained a pretty good understanding of what the market needs and wants. Now it’s time to choose your target market, that is to say, the kind of clients you’re going to market your products and services to.

Choosing the segment of the market with the most potential is an important and complex decision for any business, but as an expat entrepreneur, there are a few additional factors to bear in mind: (more…)

Starting A Business Abroad: How To Get To Know Your Clients

Posted on 27. Jan, 2010 by Emmanuelle Archer in Blog, Expat Entrepreneurs
2 comments

You’d like to advertise, but you don’t know where to run your ads. You want to make the right design choices for your website, but will your visitors like the layout you picked? You’d love to partner up with another blogger, but how to be sure you’re targeting the right readers?

Argh! It would be so much easier if you knew your clients better! Unfortunately, you have only worked with a handful of local people so far – and you can’t afford to do extensive market research to learn about their tastes, their behaviours and their habits.

Think that only big businesses with massive marketing budgets can gather detailed data about their customers? Not anymore. All the information is out there, and it’s absolutely free.

All you have to do is eavesdrop.

I know, I know – your mother taught you that it’s rude to eavesdrop. But I’m in no way advising you to go spy on your clients. You don’t need to, because every day, hundreds if not thousands of your potential clients are choosing to make their conversations public through social media.

It’s simply a matter of paying attention to what they have to say.

Being in the right place at the right time

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Starting A Business Abroad: Listen To Your Clients’ Words

Posted on 25. Jan, 2010 by Emmanuelle Archer in Blog, Expat Entrepreneurs
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Now that you’ve figured out what your clients’ needs are, here is another thing that you want to listen for: their words. You want to learn the exact words they use to describe their needs, their lifestyle, and their expectations.

Speaking your clients’ language is the quickest way to establish rapport with them. When you explain what you can do for them in their own words, they feel heard and understood. It’s a bit like a secret handshake: it shows that you’re “one of them” and that you get where they’re coming from.

As you can imagine, this process is even more vital if you’re going to be working in a language that isn’t your mother tongue. No matter how fluently you speak the local language, some small nuances or obscure cultural references are sure to elude you.

Rather than reinvent the wheel (at the risk of getting it wrong), let your clients’ words become your own.

You can easily tell when business owners fail to take the time to figure this out: they’re the ones who sound like they’re talking to themselves, using their own jargon, and forgetting that not everyone is an expert in their field.

What they have to say may be very interesting, but it’s not engaging. And if clients cannot relate, why would they buy?

What are the words and phrases that come back time and again when you listen to your clients? List them, and use them whenever you get a chance: make them your SEO keywords; put them in your website copy and your brochures; build your sales pitch around them.

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Emmanuelle

Images via Chris Blakely (top) and birdwatchr1 (bottom), via Flickr Creative Commons

Starting A Business Abroad: Listening For Your Clients’ Needs

Posted on 22. Jan, 2010 by Emmanuelle Archer in Blog, Expat Entrepreneurs
1 comment

As we’ve discussed in recent posts, your first duty as a business owner is to listen to your clients.

But what should you listen for when you’re just starting out and don’t know very much about your target market yet?

Listen for what your clients need (more…)

Starting A Business Abroad: Listen Hard

Posted on 20. Jan, 2010 by Emmanuelle Archer in Blog, Expat Entrepreneurs
3 comments

Do you, like most foreign entrepreneurs I talk to, find it intimidating to launch a business in a country where you weren’t born, a country whose culture you don’t know inside out?

Well, believe it or not, this may well be your greatest asset.

Remember when we said that marketing was the art and science of listening to your clients? As an expat entrepreneur, you’re going to have to listen hard.

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Starting A Business Abroad: 3 Things Marketing Isn’t

Posted on 18. Jan, 2010 by Emmanuelle Archer in Blog, Expat Entrepreneurs
2 comments

Now that we’ve covered the basics of planning and structuring your business, let’s spend some time looking at a key piece of your strategy: marketing.

There are hundreds of fancy definitions of marketing, most of which read like something straight out of Dilbert.

For our purposes, a basic definition of marketing could be: everything that has to do with defining, analysing, targeting, and satisfying your clients and their needs.

Not so scary, is it? I know that you may have been exposed to many myths about marketing, most of which make it sound more complicated, costly and, ahem, sleazy than it is really is.
So before we go any further, I want to dispel a few widespread misconceptions about marketing.

3 things marketing isn’t

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