如何营销一款产品：10 条行之有效的推广策略

Overview

Before we get into the nitty-gritty of promotion strategies, let’s do a quick refresher on the 4 Ps of marketing: product, price, place, and promotion.

To market any product successfully, i.e., to nail the last P, which stands for “promotion,” you need to have a firm understanding of the previous 3 Ps: product, price, and place. With that in mind, let’s take a closer look at each of the other Ps in the context of effective global marketing.

In order to market your product overseas, you first need to make sure there’s a demand for it in the target market. It’s important to understand the needs and wants of your target customers and ensure that your product is the right fit.

The first step is to understand the local market and your competition—this is where research comes in, which we’ll discuss more in detail in the following section.

Pricing is another key element of international marketing, and it’s especially important when you want to promote a product globally. When setting a price for your product, you need to take into account the local economic conditions, the perceived value of your product, and what your competition is doing.

Some businesses choose to simply convert their prices from their home currency to the local currency, while others adjust their prices to better reflect the local market. There’s no one-size-fits-all answer here—it really depends on your product and your target market.

Place refers to the distribution channels you use to get your product into the hands of your target customers. When selling overseas, you need to be aware of the local distribution channels and make sure your product is available where your target customers are looking for it.

For example, in China, ecommerce is huge. In 2021, China contributed to more than half of the world’s ecommerce retail sales, with the sales value surpassing the combined total of Europe and the United States. So, if you’re targeting the Chinese market, you need to make sure your product is available on major ecommerce platforms like Alibaba and JD.com.

Once you’ve got the first 3 Ps of marketing down, you can start thinking about the last one—promotion. Getting the word out about your product and generating interest among potential customers is essential to your success, but each market is different, so you need to tailor your promotion strategy to the local culture.

Here are some best practices for promoting your product in foreign markets.

Before you start promoting your product in a new market, it’s important to do your research on what customers really want and gain a deep understanding of the local cultural context they’re embedded in. This will help you avoid any potential cultural missteps and better tailor your promotion strategy to the target market. Some questions you should ask yourself during market research include:

Traditional translation isn’t enough when it comes to marketing—you need your content to resonate with the target audience on an emotional level. Just like you use storytelling to connect with customers in your home market, you need to do the same in foreign markets.

This is where localization comes in. Localization is the process of adapting your content to the target market beyond just translating the words. It takes into account the local culture, customs, and values to ensure that the entirety of your content—text, layout, images, colors, etc.—appeals to the target audience.

Whatever channel you choose to market your product, localizing your message gives your brand more credibility and helps you get more conversions. Speaking the language of the target audience will help raise awareness around your product—40% of global consumers won’t buy a product listed in a language other than their native tongue.

Your target audience must be able to identify with your brand’s story. Whereas some elements work cross-culturally (e.g., a happy ending), others are interpreted differently based on the cultural imprint and personal experience. Therefore, it’s crucial to align with the core values of your potential customers, which may differ from country to country.

Similar but not quite the same: The website design of Japan-based Rakuten in Japanese and French

Transcreation is the process of adapting creative content, such as marketing collateral, ad campaigns, and taglines, to a new cultural context while maintaining the original intent and style. In other words, it involves rewriting a text to adapt it to a specific culture or target audience. So it’s not only about linguistics but also about emotions and culture.

Transcreators usually come into the picture when you need to adapt the most creative elements of a piece of content: They might customize slogans, jokes, and even emojis to be culturally relevant in each local market. Other than translators, who always start from a text in the source language, transcreators start from a creative brief including ideas and concepts that the text should trigger.

For instance, Japanese parents don’t use the story of a stork delivering babies to explain how their children arrive. Instead, they tend to explain that babies come from a giant floating peach. A diaper company from the UK aiming to increase sales in Japan would benefit from adapting its marketing to take advantage of this local myth.

In a digital world, another good way to answer the public’s needs when promoting your product is multilingual SEO. Especially if you’re on a tight budget, you might want to try improving the organic SEO reach of your website before spending money on pay per click (PPC), i.e. search engine advertising (SEA). Here, too, it’s not just about translating the keywords you already targeted for your home market.

International SEO requires a thorough strategy that starts with some market research to define which audiences may be interested in your product and find out what’s important to them. Next comes competitor research, which will help you find new opportunities, especially if your competitors are not currently optimizing their content for your target market.

To be successful in SEO, you need to take care of its 3 key aspects: technical, off-page, and on-page. A holistic approach that considers all of them simultaneously is essential to get better visibility and return on investment (ROI).