5 Exciting Reasons to Expand Your Business Internationally

When a business has experienced domestic success, such as exceeding profit goals or becoming the market leader in a particular region, its management team will often hold a meeting to discuss the prospect of expansion.

Expansion is a broad term in business. It can mean growing your workforce, opening new offices, or even partnering with a new company. However, it can also mean international expansion.  

Now, international expansion is a frightening prospect for many business owners – even the most hardened and experienced pros. However, for those that don’t shy away from it, international expansion can lead to a potential goldmine of benefits; from increased profits to new audiences.

Let’s go over five of the most exciting reasons you should expand your business to different countries.

1. Access new customers

Every business wants to grow their customer base. It’s a natural goal to have.

Growing your customer base domestically can be extremely restrictive and limiting, particularly for niche businesses. Instead, by offering your products to different countries, you automatically open the floodgates to potentially millions of new customers. In fact, you may even find that your products are more appealing to your new-found international customers than they are your native ones!

But in order to appeal to new international customers, you will have to get past a specific roadblock: translation.

Marketing is important, so your content – from product advertisements to social media messages – needs to be translated and designed so that it appeals to your new audiences. Remember, each country is different, so crafting your language usage is super important!

Fortunately, you can use localization software to make life easy. You’ll be able to manage all your translation projects in one place, whilst having the risk of human error drastically reduced.

2. Diversify your workforce

International expansion means the likelihood of growing your team. This is exciting, as it means you can employ a more diverse workforce.

Diversity means new experience, knowledge, and energy. For example, if you decide to expand to an Asian market such as India, you could hire an Indian marketing expert with pre-existing knowledge of Indian markets and consumer behaviors.

3. Take your brand name to insane new heights

The most successful and profitable brands are international names. This is a fact. Apple, Nike, McDonald’s, Coca-Cola, Samsung – none of these brands would have experienced even close to the success they have if they had not expanded overseas. Sure, you can still be hugely successful by staying in your origin country, but you’re going to be limited.

International expansion means sales growth and new eyes on your brand, which can cause a ripple effect of further success elsewhere.

4. Cost savings

When businesses draw up their yearly targets, ‘save money’ is usually at the top of the list. But is saving costs easier said than done, or a realistic target to have?

Well, if you expand to global markets, or even decide to move your business location entirely to a new country, you can save costs in various ways. A big area in which you can do this is labor costs. Some countries naturally pay lower salaries compared to others, particularly when it involves manual labor work. This is worth considering if a key part of your business is manufacturing goods.

5. Future-proofing

Globalization is in full-swing. In the future, it’s highly likely that most businesses will be aiming to expand internationally due to the rise in popularity of globalization and e-commerce. So, by getting ahead of the curve and doing it now, you’ll future-proof your operations.