Creating a Go-To-Market Marketing Strategy for North America

8 things to kick-start your international marketing efforts.

Over the last few years, Indian B2B SaaS startups expanding to North America/other international markets is not an uncommon phenomenon. The big money comes from the West. People are generally more willing to pay a premium for a product or a service in the West if they are convinced of the value it adds to their business, and rightly so, most startups eagerly wait for the right opportunity to expand to North America whilst getting a foothold in the local home market.

As a startup, once you decide that you want to expand internationally, there are a ton of variables that need to be considered. It is almost like building your startup all over again but in a different country. Just this time, you don’t need to build your product all over again, but would usually require tweaking the product to fit the newer market.

Planning your marketing expansion to the North American market starts with research — This is not the market scaling exercise that you do nor the research to figure if it’s the right geography — I’m referring to the research which you do to create your marketing plan once you already have the facts & reasons to enter a new geography. This entails understanding the nuances of how a particular market uses similar products, the lingo that is used by the target industry, identifying the pros & cons of already existing products, the pain points/vacuum that they have, while also evaluating how your product stacks up against the competition & also a ton of local knowledge that you’d need to acquire whilst sitting in your own country.

While this might sound complex/complicated, it’s best to simplify it by doing a few basics right. Here are 8 things that you should do to kick-start your international marketing efforts:

1. Build Personas — Identify the decision-makers, approvers, recommenders, influencers, and snipers. Pen down details of your target audience, from their day to day activities, the titles they have, the decisions they take, the teams they lead, the operations they handle, the position they aspire to be & their influencing ability. Making a note of these will help you devise a focused marketing campaign for your target persona and create an urge to buy your product to make his/her life better. This exercise of penning down — albeit time-consuming — not only gives you the ability to market to the right person but also will help you reflect back on how your personas evolve over the years based on the growing market.
2. List Target Companies — If you are a B2B SaaS platform, having a list of top 100 target companies will help you focus at the beginning. You should start working towards how do you find a contact in a respective company, research on who would be the right person to reach out, what should be your ideal icebreaker based on the most relevant news article, pain points that they have, solutions that you’d propose, the impact that you’d create, the deck that you’d present; All this, if focused on a few target companies, will help you find an opportunity faster, plan a customized pitch, & increase your chances of converting your initial clients.
3. Engaging Potential Influencers — Most active on social media.
   These are people that can open doors for you at no cost if you can figure out what they need. Most influencers don’t really care about money (PS: I’m referring to influencers, not celebrities), but about how they can create content that will help their followers to learn something new. If you can pitch yourself in a certain way that can help increase their followers, or if a giveaway can be created for their followers, if you write a blog that features them as influencers in the industry, etc., it will appeal to them. The point is, anything that can be done to boost their ego will help you get some brownie points, which in turn will get them talking about you on their social media, during the meetups/conferences that they speak at, etc.
4. Lead Generation Portals — Google Ads, Software Advice, Capterra Other Portals
   The first ROI that you’d probably start thinking of as soon as you start investing money in a new market is the number of leads that you would generate, which will help you start a conversation with potential prospects. Some portals make it super easy in North America to generate these initial set of leads. This initial set is important as they would be the first set of prospects that you’d be interacting with & will help you understand what the market is looking for. Try Adwords, Capterra, SoftwareAdvice, G2 Crowd, IT Central Station, Trust Radius, Get App.
5. Relationship with Media portals & Blogs in your domain
   These relationships are intangible and will help you throughout your startup’s existence! It’s hard to strike gold dust the first time you reach out & interact with the folks here. The goal is to focus on getting in front of them and not really striving to get featured by them. Just be there, provide information that will help them talk about your industry better; You just need to be omnipresent, which will eventually land you that coveted coverage.
6. Conferences — Deciding on which Conferences to attend.
   Choosing to attend conferences is a super dicey decision that you’d need to take based on your industry & product. It is hard to see ROI overnight if you have a long sales cycle. The costs to exhibit at a conference are also steep, especially if your home country is in Asia. Attending conferences is like a game of minesweepers for a startup; you wouldn’t know if it’ll work for you unless you play it, and the cost of losing could be high if you’re on a thin budget.
7. Emails — Nothing works like a magical cold email if you can crack the content and send it at the right time.
   Emails are a game of timing! If you can identify the right moment to magically appear on someone’s inbox while they are trying to look for a solution to a problem that you could solve, it is a jackpot. Emails are still one of the best ways to reach out to your target audience provided you can guestimate the right timing & some smart content. On that note, here is a simple hack that tripled our email response rate.
8. Content Marketing Strategy — Hope is not a strategy. Always start at the end before you begin.
   Content is still King! If not, the Kingdom itself! Plan the type of content that you plan to create and also the rate at which you would churn it out.
   Albeit there are different types of content that you could create like

• Short-form articles
• Long-form articles
• Listicles
• White papers
• Infographics
• Webinars
• E-books
• How To…Guides
• Videos
• Podcasts etc
  It’s important to experiment & figure out what works for you before scaling up the number of content pieces.

The gist of creating a Go-To-Market plan is to understand the market thoroughly, evaluate product-market fit, pricing & competitive advantage, etc., but like any other plan, it is the execution that matters & the faster you experiment, the sooner you can learn.

To Conclude, one of the simplest ways to understand your market & the need for the product is to visit your competitors’ websites & understand the lingo & the features that they promote aggressively. This helps you evaluate how to position your product. An example of localizing your web page for a market is as small as a spelling error — Optimization over Optimisation, Color over Colour, Truck over Lorry, adding a US Phone number over the local number, etc.