Flexibility In Your International Marketing Plan

Yesterday we looked at how it is important to incorporate flexibility into your international marketing plan.  We also saw how you need feedback and the ability to maintain marketing accountability.

Incorporating flexibility into your international marketing plan will help you to:

• Adjust your marketing as you learn more about your foreign clients
• Avoid cultural blunders through feedback
• Avoid bad business decisions by listening to the feedback you get

Flexibility helps you change.  It helps you to know when to respond.  And, also how to respond.

But how can you include flexibility in your international marketing plan and still maintain marketing accountability?

This is where creating a process is important.

First let’s look at naming 4 steps in the process of incorporating flexibility into your marketing plan.

1 - Feedback

It all starts with feedback from your new foreign markets.

This is the process through which you acquire international business intelligence.  This intelligence helps you improve all of your international business strategies.

The first step in to collect feedback from your international audience, prospects and clients.  Everything counts.

2 - Assessment

Then you need to digest this information.  It may not seem obvious, but you must not immediately make assumptions.  Your assumptions will probably be culturally tainted… and they could be false.

You need to look at this information objectively.

3 - Understanding

This leads to the third step of understanding your international markets.  This does not come from your own logic.  It is almost like a light bulb going off.  You need to meet your foreign markets outside of your own comfortable environment.

This is where you can understand the feedback you get from your foreign markets.

4 - Change

And once you understand the feedback you can look at your current marketing plan and make adjustments.  You now have both the international business intelligence and the foreign market understanding.

Part Of Your Marketing Plan

By outlining these 4 steps you can plan for them.  You can add them into your international marketing plan.  And allow for the time and means necessary for required change.

How do you add them into your plan?   Being aware of this process and these steps is already a good part of the process.  A simple validation procedure or checking point is usually all you need.

• Does the feedback you have match your current international marketing plan?
• Do you need to take the time to assess this information?
• Is there any reason to dig deeper, to understand your feedback better?

And if you need to adjust your international marketing plan…

…then make the necessary changes as quickly as you can.

Better International Business Results

Effective cross-cultural marketing requires good right brain skills.  This is why it can appear difficult to bring marketing accountability into your international marketing plan.  But you simply need to identify the right process, and the right elements to measure.

Once you have established where you need to place these questions into your marketing plan, it becomes easy to evaluate and measure.

Many cultural blunders happen because businesses:

• Do not stimulate foreign market feedback enough.
• Do not take the time to assess and understand this feedback - they make their own assumptions too quickly.
• Do not make the changes their foreign market indicates they want.

If you do not have international business experience, you find this difficult to grasp fully.  Simply ask yourself these questions at key moments, milestones, or when you take action in your foreign market.

Seasoned international business professionals use similar processes to maintain flexibility.  But this process is often unconscious and they apply it continuously throughout all of their tasks.

Read The Whole Story

This is part of the Core Business Guide 4 Build Your International Marketing Strategy Be sure to check out the other useful tips to build your international marketing strategy

And you can also use this as part of the Core Business Guide 6 Analyze Your International Viability Be sure to check out the other useful tips to analyze your international viability

Need Help?

Need instructions?

• Instructions on how to use Your International Sales Road Map

Need to see where this fits in?

• A complete list of current Core Business Guides & Sub Guides for Your International Sales Road Map.

Still confused? Review your answers in the first Core Business Guide

• Core Business Guide 1 - Discover Your International Business

Simply click on one of the 8 different color coded boxes immediately below to access other core business guides.

Cindy King is a Cross-Cultural Marketer and International Sales Specialist, with over 25 years field experience in international business development. Learn how you can get more international sales