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How to release products internationally

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When you have a product for your home market that you also want to release to an international audience, take time to plan the process properly. An incomplete or badly executed international release might lead to poor initial impressions in the target market. Your first chance to introduce your brand or product might also be your only chance, as competitors are also doing their best to expand. It's hard to make up for the lost opportunity later.

Choose your international strategy

First, decide on your overall strategy that guides all the practical steps that follow.

User base

Customers tend to adopt great products even if they aren't officially supported in their region. If you see that your product is popular in some markets without much effort on your part, you might grab that opportunity and release a fully supported version there. This release could involve creating a localized product version with translated UI and documentation and offering customer support in the local language or languages. It could also mean starting an all-new marketing and sales campaign in the target market or increasing your marketing push if you're already investing there. If the target audience has used an earlier version of your product or knows another product you make, you can benefit from that familiarity in your marketing.

If you feel that you have a product that would be successful in a whole new market, you need to determine what helps your product be successful in the target market. For example, you need to deal with anything that would block your product release entirely. Such things include:

  • New or modified functionality is needed. For example, you have a product that helps users to manage their taxes. It needs to be adapted to each market.
  • The rules for data privacy are different. For example, consider the GDPR in Europe.
  • You might need to comply with new or different regulations. For example, if you're releasing a game, it needs to follow the local age rating system.

Marketing and sales

The overall strategy of your marketing campaign should be guided by the factors that made you consider the international release in the first place. As discussed previously, sometimes you find that customers are coming to you, that is, your product is already used in the target market despite not having full support there. This situation leads to a different strategy than if you think you have identified an opportunity to enter a market where you have no presence yet. This case would require you to “generate” that presence by a direct marketing campaign. You need to make potential customers aware that your product exists, why it's a great solution for their needs, and why your company is a good, reliable service provider.

Regardless of the approach, it's critically important that your campaign suits the target market. You need to identify which marketing channels offer the best opportunities. For example, traditional advertising, social media and influencers, search engine optimization (SEO), trade shows, and email campaigns can all be effective, depending on what kind of product you have.

It's entirely possible that your company doesn’t currently have the knowledge needed to make the best choices for the campaign. You might need to hire new people, work with vendors, or set up a partnership with another company. You might even need those extra people simply because your current sales staff doesn’t have enough people to handle both your existing and new marketing.

As with people, some new processes might need to be set up to accommodate the needs and requirements of the new target markets. If you're going to operate in the market directly, your company needs to be registered there, comply with local tax regulations, and follow local HR policies. These matters are just a few examples that must be considered. If you're going work with a local partner or vendor, much of this work will usually be handled by them.

When you know where and how your marketing happens, you need to prepare the marketing materials. Simply translating your existing materials for the selected channels and publishing them the same way you did for your home market is likely to end poorly. Again, you need people with marketing experience in the chosen market.

Marketing is such a critical area that it can benefit from transcreation. which is more extensive and thus more costly than other form of localization. Re-creation of your campaign’s multimedia assets, such as filmed commercials, is one form of transcreation.

Language support

When you have selected the target markets, you need to lock down which languages are going to be supported. Are you going to try to support all languages in all your target markets, or prioritize some languages or markets, perhaps adding more after launch? For example, in Japan Japanese is the dominant language and you should focus your support on Japanese. But many countries have more than one official language, and some unofficial languages might also be worth supporting. Supporting common languages such as Spanish have the advantage of covering many markets at once, although you still need to account for regional variations and conventions.

Language support can incur considerable costs, especially if your original product development didn’t plan for internationalization. Even if internationalization was accounted for, each new language version still comes with an incremental cost.

Payment methods

Every market doesn’t have the same payment methods available. And even if a given method is available, it might be little used. Research which options are commonly used in the markets you're targeting. You should offer several ways to pay for your product. Credit cards, online payment methods such as Stripe, Paypal, or Google Pay, multi-currency accounts, and transfer via a third party such as Western Union are some possibilities worth investigating.

Selling your product in a new country often means that you get payments in a new currency. It's worth considering whether you should use a bank that is local for the target market for this business. At some point you want to repatriate those profits, so plan for that eventuality when you think about your banking solution.

Foreign currencies involve what is called a foreign exchange risk, as currency exchange rates can fluctuate. Cash repatriation also affects your taxes, so good planning can reap considerable benefits.

Before even considering the specifics of your product, you need to look into your company starting operations in the target market. As with marketing and sales, you can benefit from the assistance of in-country talent. For example, Europe’s GDPR law has changed the way customer data privacy is handled. Patent rights and lawsuits are also potential issues.

When it comes to your product, it must comply with all legal and trade requirements of each target market. Some of the things you need to consider are taxes, warranties, trademarks, certificates, import regulations, declarations of conformity, and packaging of the product if it's a physical delivery. For more information, see International laws and standards.

What do I need to do next?

After you have established a strategy, it’s time to put it into motion. When you're doing this, you should honestly examine what you and your company know about these matters, Equally important is to understand what you don’t know. When you have this knowledge, seek out people and partners who can help you with the areas you need help with.

When you’ve done this assessment of your capabilities and started to acquire the help you need, lay out your timeline. Be realistic about the speed at which things can happen. International product releases aren't a simple and quick process.

Speaking of timelines, perhaps the most important thing to remember about compliance is that it typically takes a very long lead time to have everything up and running.

You need to work with your legal team to see if they can handle all the issues you identified earlier and any other problems that might arise. This might be an area where you need to seek assistance from in-country legal counsel.

As an example, for some industries you might have to perform local testing or quality control in some countries to gain approval for your product. As another example, product liability and consumer protection laws might work differently from your home market. The potential hazards are numerous and we can’t emphasize enough the need for research, assessing your capabilities, seeking local help if necessary, and keeping your schedules realistic.

Banking and payments

If you decided to use a local bank in your target market, your financial team needs to work with them to set up accounts and everything else that is needed. This process might tie in with the legal and trade requirements. You must also choose whether the target markets customers will pay using their local currency or your original market currency. Fluctuating rates can affect prices considerably.

Earlier you determined which payment methods you're going to support in the target market, and now you need to set up support for them. For example, if you sell your product through a web store, it might need an update to support any new methods. If you have an app that features in-app payments, the new methods need to be integrated.

The pricing of your product might also need adjustment for the target market. You don’t want to underprice or overprice your offering. You might want to consider discounts in the beginning to help grow your user base in the target market. But be mindful of arbitrage. If you offer a cheaper price in the target market, your source market customer might take advantage of that and buy your product there. The more expensive your product is, the more important it's to consider this possibility. For example, industrial products can cost millions of dollars.

Localization

Your product should be designed according to the principles of internationalization, making it as easy to localize as possible. Thus it should have support for locales and language settings, and its localizable resources should be externalized. Besides the product itself, you should have selected a localization partner and agreed on a process with them. For more information about the whole localization process, refer to Localizing your product.

Product delivery

Physical products need shipping to local warehouses and distribution deals to stores. Customers are going to be unhappy if they can only get your product by waiting many weeks for expensive international delivery.

If your product is something that could be manufactured in-country, that is worth considering as it could let you avoid many import-related issues. These include customs duties and tariffs, taxes, import licensing, and shipping, for example.

Local support and infrastructure

You need to build up regional support for your products when you expand into new markets. A software product might need servers or datacenters in the area to avoid latency. For example, many online games have servers around the world to offer a level playing field.

You should also consider making your web store, customer service, and support webpages available in the languages you have localized your product for. If you offer local customer service, it should be reachable during the business hours of the target market.

You should also prepare for refunds and, if you sell a physical product, returns and repairs. If you have set up procedures for these in advance, the customers have a better experience than if they need to research how to do it individually.