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.

All business owners should listen hard. Yet most of them don’t. They make the capital mistake of assuming that their clients are “just like them”.

But in your case, you know full well that your local clients aren’t just like you. So you’re going to put in the necessary effort to learn about their expectations, their tastes, and their behaviours.

If this sounds like the very basics of marketing strategy, that’s because it is.

Three marketing priorities

What does this mean in concrete terms for your business?
Three priorities come to mind:

1. Listening: Find out who your clients are and what they need

2. Interacting: Engage your clients in conversation, be it a casual chat or formal market research

3. Getting feedback: Use your research results to develop new products and services, or to tweak existing ones

You don’t need a big marketing department, a multimillion-dollar budget, or an MBA to achieve this. There are hundreds of ways to do effective, low-cost market research, even if you’re a solo entrepreneur with a busy schedule.

In the next post, we’ll take a more detailed look at priority #1: Listening.

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Emmanuelle

Images by ~Darin~ via Flickr Creative Commons