In Marketing

Prior market education

When businesses want to expand their scope of operations, it is essential to acquire a thorough market knowledge beforehand: they need to be clear about current market conditions, growth opportunities and expected demand. They need to prior identify market limits and potential barriers to entry in case of planning an expansion to a foreign country.

Nowadays, business transparency plays an important role when pioneering a new market, especially since all relevant business information must be accessible for all project-involved parties. In today’s time-sensitive environment, taking fast, data-based decisions is essential for a businesses’ success. Often times though, decisions are slowed down due to limited access to data, data dispersed in several systems and locations, therefore information is only available to a restricted amount of staff.

Opportunities to facilitate the business expansion

A data management solution significantly smoothes business processes by centralizing information and standardizing them and lets you leverage data to enter new markets. Centrally managing data within one tool provides transparency: all authorized staff members get an overview of the entire list of company resources, enabling smart data searches, data enrichment and/or edits. Data quality increases automatically, since all members work on the same version of information. In everyday business, taking data-driven decisions is a norm, requiring data to be of high quality. With a data management solution, these are sound decisions, since data emanates from a reliable and highly consistent source of information.

Communication channels between internal staff members as well as external exchanges with suppliers and/or partners are shortened significantly this way. The time-loss of requesting a piece of information from Finance or IT, that for iinstance enrich the international business expansion plan, is eliminated: a businesses’ work is based on time-efficient processes which have been established with a data solution. The fact that they are using a unique point of reference requires all staff members to refer to it instead of dealing with diverse sets of data that are spread around multiple tools.

Additionally, staff members no longer battle with unclear responsibilities when defining new market structures, since personalized workflows have already determined ownership – clearly listing project tasks according to their priorities. A data management solution lets them prohibit and limit data access in order to strictly regulate who can access confidential company information. Workflows can also contain checks of validation before a staff member is allowed to move on to a next work step. Ultimately, this regulated flow of operation leads to an improved team collaboration during the market set up, advancing the businesses’ introduction. Having learned from previously established processes, businesses can monitor and improve these in terms of their efficiencies and apply these optimized, strong processes to the strategy of approaching the targeted market. With the help of personalized data dashboards, they are furthermore able to inspect their data quality, follow data recommendations concerning any imperfections and constantly guarantee accurate and safe data that is on its way to enter the new market. With these reports, they are turning data into actionable insight and draw conclusions from it.

Businesses that have defined campaigns with a data management process, use a standardized communication processes which already entails the selling method and nurturing leads. Their established distribution model regularly updates and synchronizes all their distribution channels (such as: web, mobile, PoS, marketplace, etc.) -which makes it easier to replicate these for the future expansion to the targeted market. Especially the translation of each distribution channel with the ready contextualized content takes less time, as well as the time-to-market. A business is able to quickly launch new product information on all channels, and the adaptation of this content to market trends and changing user interests is nearly performed in real-time.

The long-term benefits of leveraged data

During this critical time of a businesses’ expansion, a data management software provides a platform for organic growth and expansion. Based on structured quality data, businesses can focus entirely on their core activities, which also creates more time to discover further growth opportunities and eventually achieve a competitive advantage. Without doubt, a business has higher chances to succeed in a foreign market when being organized, since they are making decisions with unique, reliable and highly consistent data. Consequently, a data managing solution has become a highly valuable tool to facilitate the development of an international strategy.