Small company owners who start a local business often face dilemmas when planning for growth. Most of the time, they get confused about which advice to follow to improve their business. Some business owners believe that it’s best to expand their local business and make it into an international brand. Others will tell you to focus on the local market because your business may not survive if you try to compete with bigger and global brands. With this, you might find it hard to decide whether to continue with your strategies or start implementing new strategies that will allow you to gain more recognition from a global market.
The key to finding the right strategies to implement is to reevaluate your current business situation. This means you have to revisit your goals for your company. If you believe that your brand is not making any progress when it comes to achieving growth, it may be time to change your strategies. Keep in mind that 20% of small businesses don’t make it after a year. This means, your business is also prone to failure if you don’t make all the necessary preparations.
Common Challenges of Local Businesses
Before you dive into implementing new strategies, you need to find out the most common challenges your business needs to address. Knowing these problems will help you decide on the best next move to ensure your business survives. Here are some challenges that your business needs to solve:
- Maintaining a positive cash flow
- Attracting customers
- Improving brand awareness
- Balancing stability and growth
Achieving Growth through Local and Global Strategies
Staying local while going global seems impossible because the concept alone is contradictory. However, if you know how to implement the right strategies, you can ensure that your business survives no matter what. The key is to determine the best strategies that will allow your business to gain a competitive advantage in your locality while achieving recognition in the global market. For more information about this, here are a few strategies that will help you improve your business:
- Focus on impressing the local market—Understand your local customers’ needs and ensure to meet their demands. Studying their purchasing behaviour will help you get ideas on attracting new clients, including a global audience. Keep in mind that local and global strategies may differ because of major differences in market demands and business procedures. However, you can always find out some effective strategies that will work on both target markets.
- Invest in local marketing strategies—Build a name for your brand in the local market by implementing promotional strategies that target the local market. Keep in mind that gaining recognition from a global market will be difficult if you can’t even convince local buyers to choose your brand. Thus, you have to ensure that local customers know that your brand exists.
- Establish your brand online—Build an online presence and ensure that you people can reach out to you via a website or social media pages. Remember that most consumers prefer to trust brands that have a strong online presence. Thus, you have to build an authoritative website and professional-looking social media pages.
- Work with influencers—Advertising your business may be expensive, but you sometimes need to spend a lot to achieve business growth. If you want a cost-effective strategy to increase brand awareness, consider working with influencers. Target individuals or brands with a huge fan base so you can tap them and eventually encourage them to become your clients.
- Evaluating your preparedness for global expansion—You need to find out if your business is ready for global expansion. If not, you have to continue implementing strategies that make your brand stand out in the local market. Remember, you need to ensure that you have a robust plan to go global before launching your international brand. Consult experts such as reliable lawyers to ensure that your business expansion will not create legal disputes.
Having local and international customers will definitely help improve your business. It’s an excellent opportunity to gain more income and maintain positive cash flow. However, you need to understand that converting your local business into a global brand is not easy. If you don’t implement the right strategies, your business may suffer huge losses, especially when it comes to revenue. Thus, you have to understand that expanding your business is necessary for growth. However, you also need to ensure that you already established your brand in the local market. This way, you won’t find it difficult to build your reputation with an international audience.
