One article to understand brand overseas marketing

When the growth rate of domestic traffic and demographic dividend slowed down, brands began to look for new business opportunities and new outlets, and going overseas was seen as a panacea to alleviate the lack of growth, and this is indeed the case.

After Double 11, a hot search on the social platform #It turns out that Chinese brands are so popular on Black Friday overseas# attracted widespread attention from marketers.

Image source: Screenshot of social platform

According to Amazon data, sales during "Black Friday" and "Cyber ​​Monday" in 2021 set new records. Among the overseas categories of Chinese brands, electric toothbrushes, sweeping robots, original clothing, trendy toys, etc. were the best-selling. Chinese brands such as Ecovacs, Anntrue, and Bedsure have achieved remarkable results during the Black Friday and Cyber ​​Monday promotion season.

Not only are overseas cross-border platforms sending signals that brands going overseas have entered a bonus period. Alibaba also conveyed to the outside world that going overseas will be an important trend in brand marketing next year.

Data shows that in the third quarter of 2021, Alibaba's overseas digital business segment generated 11.3 billion yuan in revenue, a year-on-year increase of 34%, accounting for 7% of Alibaba's total revenue. The growth mainly came from Southeast Asian e-commerce platform Lazada and Turkish e-commerce platform Trendyol, among which Lazada's order volume doubled year-on-year.

Judging from the data from cross-border e-commerce platforms, going overseas will undoubtedly be the next battlefield for brands to compete.

01How popular is it for brands to go overseas?

According to customs statistics, in the first three quarters of 2021, my country's total foreign trade exports amounted to US$2,400.82 billion, a year-on-year increase of 33.0%. Calculated in RMB, the total value of my country's goods exports in the first three quarters was 15.55 trillion yuan, an increase of 22.7%. Compared with the same period in 2020, my country's foreign trade exports increased by 24.5%.

Among them, it is worth noting that the export capacity of private enterprises continues to increase. In the first three quarters, my country's private enterprises' imports and exports totaled 13.65 trillion yuan, up 28.5%, the fastest growth rate, accounting for 48.2% of the total foreign trade value.

For brands, identifying the right dividends and seizing new tracks can enable business to grow rapidly and achieve twice the result with half the effort. Where is the marketing dividend in 2022? Obviously, the overseas market is undoubtedly the second growth curve of the company and one of the ways to bring more possibilities to brands next year.

Although most companies are aware of the business opportunities of going overseas, at the same time, we must also be aware that most brands going overseas rely on cross-border e-commerce platforms and traffic. From some perspectives, companies are restricted by platforms and will soon face traffic bottlenecks. At the same time, under this state, the brand is hollowed out and it is difficult for business to continue to grow in the long term.

When the "hot" of going overseas has become a reality. Next, what needs to be solved is how to use brand marketing to empower business growth and bring more brand growth and premium space. This article invites Su Hao, SVP of Global Operations of Shiqu Brand, to share his experience in going overseas, which may give you some inspiration.

02 From "entering the market" to "going global", three major challenges facing brands

Brand expansion overseas is not as simple and impressive as a number or a piece of data may seem. At the current stage, brands will face some difficulties in the actual process of going overseas: whether to go overseas, what to sell overseas, and how to build an overseas team. All of these are directly related to whether the brand is truly going overseas?

Question 1: Should we go out to sea?

Even brands that have experience in going overseas will still think about this question: whether to go overseas or not.

Going overseas will be divided into different regional markets, such as Japan, South Korea, Europe, the United States, Southeast Asia, etc. Every time a brand chooses a target market, it needs to ask itself: Should it go overseas? Currently, most brands that have successfully expanded overseas basically choose a relatively conservative strategy: first conquer one hill, and then conquer the next hill. For brands, different target markets mean a new challenge for going overseas.

For brands that are considering going overseas, they need to ask themselves: Should they go overseas?

You should know that going overseas may not be suitable for all brands. Brands that intend to go overseas need to evaluate in advance: the brand's penetration rate in the domestic Chinese market, the current scale of the industry it is in, and the growth rate. If a brand still has a lot of room to tap in the Chinese market, there is actually no need to go overseas and it can focus on the Chinese market first.

Question 2: What to sell overseas?

At present, the reason why most brands choose cross-border e-commerce platforms is that they don’t know what they should sell. It is not clear whether to expand all SKUs to overseas markets, choose popular SKUs, or have other better product selection strategies.

Taking the US consumer goods industry as an example, consumer electronics has the highest penetration rate. This type of product basically does not have much regional difference in user usage. When sold in different regions, the product only needs to change the software language. It is a category that has grown rapidly in the past two years. Next are clothing, footwear and home appliances. Pet care, beauty and skin care, consumer health care, personal accessories and glasses are also popular.

However, for packaged food, beverages, cosmetics, etc., different regional markets have different industry standards and very regionalized preferences. Brands need to understand culture in order to know consumers’ favorite flavors, aesthetic trends, etc. This requires brands to have very deep insights and cognition of users.

So, the advantage for brands selling goods on cross-border e-commerce platforms such as eBay and Amazon is that they can produce product selection and category promotion strategies based on the platform's traffic operations. Brands can use platform data to gain insights into which products are popular and selling well and which products are not selling well. In other words, the platform can help brands with product selection training in regional markets, allowing brands to better understand user preferences in the local market.

Of course, the disadvantages are also obvious, that is, the platform has limitations, traffic operations have bottlenecks, and at the same time, the brand has not been branded. Cross-border e-commerce platforms are a panacea, but not a long-term cure.

Problem 3: How to build an overseas team?

Before going global and launching their brands in the target market, there is often a common problem: how to build a team for going global, whether to form a domestic marketing team or to form a new team in the overseas market.

For brands, no matter which model is adopted, it is important to have a team and talents that have full knowledge and insight into the target market, establish a global communication system, and have localized marketing capabilities. This is the key to brand overseas marketing.

03 Breakthrough: Five common misunderstandings about overseas marketing

I believe that there are quite a few brands that have experience in going overseas, but due to survivor bias, all we can see are those that are doing very well, so we think that only these good brands are going overseas. So, why do some brands do well in overseas expansion, while others make no progress and gain nothing...where lies the problem?

Through interviews with global brands, we found five common misunderstandings among brands in their overseas marketing.

Misconception 1: Joining an overseas e-commerce platform means you have completed your overseas expansion.

When going overseas, brands often choose to enter overseas e-commerce platforms as soon as possible. Once they have completed the process of listing products, selling products, shipping, and successful transactions, they think that going overseas has been completed, and they just need to replicate and continue the rolling order volume.

In fact, most overseas local brands basically adopt the site group model to operate. They will not only settle in the platform, but also have brand independent sites and category independent sites. Among them, both platform and category independent sites play a role in attracting traffic, and independent sites are private domain traffic logic, which can better convey brand information and value and accumulate brand user assets.

YesWelder is a relatively unpopular Chinese welding machine brand that specializes in designing and manufacturing welding machines, welding helmets, and accessories that welding enthusiasts like. On Black Friday, the brand's sales on North American sites increased 253% year-on-year.

Image source: Screenshot of the brand’s official website

It is understood that on the one hand, the brand relies on the advantages of the domestic supply chain, and on the other hand, it uses independent site community operations and content operations to enable it to successfully go overseas and become an entry-level welding machine brand overseas.

The reason for this model is closely related to the user habits of overseas markets. For example, in Europe and the United States, users like to purchase products through brand independent websites. At the same time, brands can accumulate a large number of users' shopping preferences and habits through independent websites, accumulate user data, and carry out personalized marketing and operations for users.

Of course, brands will not be limited to the two channels of cross-border e-commerce platforms and independent websites. For example, the LABUBU lucky cat hanging card sold by Pop Mart in Japan. In terms of channels, Pop Mart not only chose online cross-border e-commerce platforms, but also used overseas independent station channels, and even offline retail stores, pop-up stores, robot stores, etc., to continue to attract consumers in different markets in the form of a combination of punches.

Image source: Screenshot of social platform

Furthermore, Korean brands like RAEL, which promotes sanitary napkins with 100% organic cotton as its main product, have accumulated a large amount of user data through the brand's independent website. Based on further exploration of user needs, the brand has gradually expanded its SKUs from sanitary napkins to menstrual underwear, menstrual facial cleansers, etc., based on the user's menstrual cycle scenarios.

In short, a brand’s entry into overseas e-commerce platforms is only the first step in “entering the ocean”. To truly go overseas, there is still a lot of room for brands to do in terms of channels alone.

Misconception 2: Overseas marketing is all about content distribution and submitting the same manuscript to multiple places.

Among all the brands going overseas, most of them still use traditional marketing ideas to create influence and place advertisements on overseas social media. Some of them publish press releases, and some of them do performance advertising. The reason is actually very simple. These brands are still in the blind launch period and do not know how to do overseas marketing. They can only do a wave of launches first to increase brand awareness. Of course, some brands also seek recognition from the capital market, for example: You see, I also have influence overseas, media coverage, etc.

In fact, the social ecological environment and social platforms in each regional market have their own characteristics, and the content aesthetics and community culture are extremely different. If a brand wants to enhance its influence through media communication channels, social platforms, etc., it needs to customize its creations based on local cultural characteristics, user preferences, KOLs, etc., rather than distributing PR content in different regional markets.

In general, brand communication content needs to be customized, and it is necessary to pay attention to the fact that different media platforms have different language styles and KOLs.

Customized content can help users in the target market deepen their knowledge and understanding of the brand. If you simply submit one draft to multiple publications to cover content, you may not be able to achieve the desired effect that the brand wants. From current observations, there are quite a few brands that operate in this way, and they are still a certain distance away from the brands that truly go overseas in terms of content creation and content dissemination.

Misconception 3: Going overseas means selling the most popular products.

Most brands will give priority to exporting domestic hot-selling products. In fact, products that are popular in China may not be well accepted in overseas markets. It can be said that market demand and consumer preferences are changing every day. A product that is popular today may not be popular tomorrow, let alone if the product is moved to a new region or a new group of users.

Brands seeking growth should not be limited to quantity, but should also think from the perspective of the current new business environment, where are the value points that truly impress consumers to buy, and whether there is a personalized consumption nature. This means that brands need to "localize their products" for their target markets when conducting overseas marketing.

The “product localization” here includes two levels:

First, at the product material level, the brand can adapt to the target market from the perspectives of product design, product raw materials, product logic and even sales methods.

Image source: Screenshot of the brand's official website

In recent years, the personalized nutrition products market in the United States has continued to be hot, among which Care of is one of the representative brands. The product design concept behind it comes from deep insights into consumers, such as consumers do not know how to choose vitamins that are suitable for them, or do not know which brand to trust.

Based on this insight, Care of collects consumer data from dimensions such as living and eating habits and taking habits through online questionnaires, and uses algorithms to match appropriate vitamins and other nutritional supplements. Both the product and user experience have become more personalized, eliminating the complicated process of matching and selecting nutritional supplements by oneself.

The second is the choice of product channels. Brands can adopt a "localized" channel layout based on the target market, category attributes, consumer habits, etc.

Specifically, when entering the Southeast Asian market, Bestore stated that its most important goal was to complete the testing first. It launched a variety of food flavors on the cross-border e-commerce platform Shopee, with the aim of finding flavors that suit the tastes of Southeast Asian people.

Image source: Screenshot of social platform

This actually means that brands also need to localize their choice of overseas channels, make judgments based on the characteristics of the products and local shopping habits, and adjust product distribution ideas based on consumer feedback from different channels. In the early stages, they can also try multiple channels, or they can cooperate with brands that already have overseas experience, especially those with accumulated experience in channels, to carry out a joint product collaboration and try with the help of the overseas brands' channel experience.

Also, for example, for beauty brands, although the online consumption trend in Southeast Asia is growing rapidly, beauty products are more suitable for offline scenarios in Southeast Asia.

Product selection strategy is something that brands should consider seriously when entering a new market, but it is not an easy task. Brands need to combine market and consumer feedback and make continuous adjustments in order to gradually grasp consumption trends and lead the trend.

Misconception 4: Ignoring communication and interaction with users.

Similar to the domestic social environment, the booming development of foreign social media has also brought marketing dividends to brands. For example, most of the successful overseas DTC brands in the early days actually took advantage of the social media window. These brands used the technology and traffic of media platforms such as TikTok, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, etc. to establish close communication and interaction with consumers.

Take the beauty DTC brand Glossier as an example. It became popular on a small scale on American social platforms in the early days of its establishment because the fans of the founder helped the brand to attract a certain amount of attention, which laid the foundation for its subsequent success. Its investor, Sequoia Capital partner Michael Abramson, once said: Among the DTC brands we have seen, Glossier has a very close relationship with consumers.

Image source: Brand official screenshot

Some overseas brands have also opened social accounts on different platforms, but most of them are just reposting, and the content is not updated frequently. The reason for this phenomenon is still the difference in language and culture, and the brand's inability to adapt to the local environment also limits the transmission of the brand's voice. However, if a brand decides to go overseas, then the interaction and communication between the brand and users on social platforms are also key points that need to be paid attention to.

The brand’s daily posts and interactions allow consumers to have a deeper understanding of the brand’s philosophy, brand tone, and the story of the brand’s founder, and even “see” interesting and fun things through the brand. This also indirectly accelerates consumers’ recognition of the brand, emotional development, and sales conversion.

Taking DJI as an example, judging from the posting and content data, DJI has a very stable posting frequency and also shares through KOLs. In terms of content, the brand chooses to start with points that interest users in the target market. For example, some fans are very interested in both products and technology. The brand will share some popular science introductions to drone technology, as well as videos that show how cool the products are. The brand's interaction rate is very high.

Image source: Brand official screenshot

Using content marketing as an entry point can, on the one hand, continue to deepen users' impression of the brand. On the other hand, starting from fans' interests and preferences can also stimulate fans' spontaneous willingness to spread the word, thereby spreading brand content to more user groups and further enhancing the brand's influence on overseas social platforms.

Misconception 5: Chinese brands must use Chinese elements when marketing overseas.

With the rise of national trends, cultural confidence and national strength, brands will also want to focus on labels such as "Chinese elements" and "Chinese style" that represent Chinese symbols when going overseas. Whether a brand should use Chinese elements depends mainly on the strength of the relationship between its product power, brand concept and Chinese elements. Strong relationships: Chinese elements are a way for overseas users to quickly recognize a brand. Weak relationships will affect brand output.

Take Hua Xizi as an example. The brand itself is positioned as oriental beauty and Chinese beauty. The carvings in the product design, the packaging gift boxes, etc. all reflect many Chinese elements, as well as the intangible cultural heritage ethnic cosmetics gift boxes, etc. Whether it is brand positioning to product design, packaging design and Chinese elements, they are all strongly related. Therefore, it is only natural for brands to promote Chinese elements, which will also highlight the brand's competitive advantages.

Image source: Brand official screenshot

On the contrary, if a beauty brand focuses on scientific skin care, ingredient-oriented, or minimalist style, edible materials, color design, etc., without Chinese elements, users will not feel it very strongly. Brands should focus on their brand advantages, match market demand, and package their brand stories.

04How many steps are there from "entering the sea" to "going overseas" in overseas marketing?

Regarding brand going overseas, there is a saying in the industry: one is product going overseas, and the other is brand going overseas.

There are two main ways to export goods: one is the platform e-commerce model, where companies sell products through international e-commerce platforms such as Amazon, AliExpress, Wish, eBay, etc., also known as cross-border platform sellers. The other is the DTC e-commerce model, where companies break free from the constraints of third-party platforms and sell independently, also known as cross-border independent site sellers.

Compared with platform e-commerce, DTC e-commerce has obvious advantages in operational autonomy and consumer value realization. But whether it is a platform seller or an independent site seller, they are all selling goods and cannot have loyal consumers and brand premium space like a brand.

Most companies have also begun to pay attention to brand expansion overseas and think about how to truly build a brand overseas and obtain commercial compound interest through brand marketing. If brands want to do a good job in overseas marketing, they might as well think about the following three questions:

In fact, these "three forces" are also the underlying logic of a brand's overseas expansion. It is necessary to jointly shape the brand image through products and operations, and then use the brand image to feed back to products and operations. This is a triangular structure of effects for harvesting business. In other words, the three complement and achieve each other.

1) Product level

Some people say that when it comes to product selection, what is important is not the method but the thinking. Therefore, it is recommended that you do not blindly pursue hot products, but instead think about whether a certain product will be popular in the target market. That is, you should first learn to reverse the logic behind it, and then dig deep into the path of optimizing the product. This is a good product selection mindset.

2) Operational level

As a seller, from an operational perspective, you should first highlight branding at the operational level of promotion (materials, homepage, content), then improve the relevance of advertising materials and pages, pay attention to the advertising audience experience from the aspects of purchase, logistics, after-sales, etc., and refine the customer experience and content. This is a good promotion logic.

3) Brand level

Most of the very popular overseas brands have a distinctive proposition, or are branded with an original intention related to environmental protection, technology, or animals that attract the attention of young people. These are the most powerful brand stories in the early stages of brand establishment, helping to quickly establish and sustain the brand.

Image source: Screenshot of the brand's official website

For example, Ivory Ella, a DTC clothing brand founded in 2015, has a cute elephant as its classic iconic element, which also represents the brand’s core concept and goal: to be committed to elephant protection. Ivory Ella has pledged to donate 10% of its profits to elephant conservation organizations. In addition to the elephant protection organization, Ivory Ella also raises funds for groups such as children and veterans, and is committed to the development of social welfare.

Image source: Screenshot of the brand's official website

The brand not only has a clear concept and story, but also closely integrates the brand story with the target customer group. The brand has cooperated with more than 30 schools using the "elephant" element and spreads brand information through school brand ambassadors. Its core customer group is female consumers aged 13-24. Moreover, because the product style is lively and beautiful, it not only has fashionable tie-dye, but also comes with cute and personalized patterns. At the same time, it has an environmentally friendly and public welfare brand concept, which has won the favor of many young women.

In fact, Chinese companies going overseas are generally not good at telling brand stories. Especially when facing different overseas markets and cultures, higher requirements are placed on companies' ability to shape brand stories.

Finally, for enterprises, it is even more necessary to establish a long-term vision in the relatively weak area of ​​brand building and learn from mature overseas brands. Learn to establish brand planning, constantly polish the brand story, convey it to consumers in an effective way, and gain their favor.

Author: Time Fun

Source: SocialTouchST (ID: SocialTouchST)