Four lessons to learn before you market your UK-based small business abroad

With the pound hitting record lows in recent weeks, earning money from international markets has become increasingly appealing for UK-based businesses. However, if you’re eyeing up opportunities overseas for your small business, be sure to incorporate the points below into your plans if you want to get the most out of your new international venture.

Your sense of cultural awareness can make or break you

Whether you’re marketing your goods online, heading to trade shows to get your products in front of the right people and make the right connections, or creating video adverts to engage your new overseas audiences, cultural awareness is fundamental to your success.

The importance of cultural awareness and diversity is certainly not lost on business leaders. In the US alone, companies spend a staggering $8 billion per year on diversity training. That expenditure is echoed in countries around the world as businesses seek to create diverse, inclusive, and equitable workforces, working environments, and customer bases.

When it comes to marketing your UK-based small business abroad, cultural awareness is non-negotiable. It can help you to engage customers and win their long-term loyalty for your brand. A lack of cultural awareness, meanwhile, can offend consumers and leave your company struggling to make a dent in the target market.

Marketing translation is a hugely specialised area of work

How much does a French translator cost? This is a good starting point, but it’s not quite what you need to be asking – the right question is how much a French marketing translator costs. That’s because marketing translation is a specialised area of work within the broader field of translation. You’re paying not just for your translator’s linguistic knowledge, but also for their marketing expertise – and the more specialist the skills base you need, the more you can reasonably expect to pay.

Say you’re looking for an English to French translation services for your small business’ marketing materials. Such services come in various shapes and sizes. Accuracy and quality come with relying on native speakers and sector-specific expertise. That means using a service that has marketing translators who have a deep understanding of the French market.

This brings up the question of whether to rely solely on human translators or to use machine translation. The latter is fast and free – two major attractions for many small businesses. Which is the best French translation site? Well, if you’re going down the machine translation route, you certainly have plenty of options. However, for the kind of nuanced copy that is so key to successful marketing materials, using a human translator is likely to deliver more impactful results.

It pays to factor in changing economic circumstances – at home and overseas

The UK has been on a tumultuous economic journey of late. And that’s putting it mildly. The change of Prime Minister from Boris Johnson to Liz Truss, shortly followed by then-Chancellor of the Exchequer Kwasi Kwarteng’s “mini budget”, delivered a sharp economic downturn while the country was already struggling.

For small businesses, the situation served as a sharp reminder of the impact that changing economic circumstances can have. When people cut back on their discretionary spending, businesses that rely on that custom can be hit hard.

Small businesses that sell their goods overseas are doubly at risk from economic headwinds because there is the potential to face them in more than one marketplace at once. At times, this can balance out, with one market performing well while another dips. Yet businesses need to be prepared to weather drops in multiple markets at once before they take their products abroad. A contingency fund and a plan to deal with such a situation are essential.

Part of this means keeping a close eye on the wider political and economic context wherever you plan to market your UK business. Seeing economic turbulence coming often provides the opportunity to handle it better when it arrives, no matter which country it’s in.

The right partners can make all the difference

Small businesses can benefit from building partnerships and outsourcing parts of their operations in myriad ways. To do so, however, they need to ensure they are working with the right partners.

Having used French translation services in the example above, let’s stick with France when considering such partnerships. After all, it is not only geographically close to the UK but very similar in terms of its gross domestic product (GDP); the UK’s is $2.638 trillion, while France’s is $2.583 trillion. The UK and France account for 3.26% and 3.19% of world GDP respectively and are the sixth and seventh largest countries by GDP.

Succeeding in France means sending goods to that country using a reliable service – one that delivers on time and provides superb customer service – both to the small business and the end consumer – when things go wrong. It also means making decisions around whether local storage is needed, in which case a reliable, secure warehousing partner may well be added to the list of essential firms that you work with.

Then there’s the customer service element to think about. How will you be handling enquiries from French-speaking customers? Will you be providing multilingual customer support by email or by telephone? Taking on an in-house customer support team can be costly, so buying in some kind of partnership solution could work well and be more budget friendly. Some translation services offer this kind of multilingual customer support, so bear this in mind when arranging your marketing translation support and ask the agencies you’re speaking with if it’s something that they do. Buying in both services together could be a neat and cost-effective solution.

Partnerships such as these can strengthen your business offering. You just need to factor in enough time to identify the areas in which you will need support and then find the best partnership solution that fits within your budget. Doing this in a rush is never a good idea, which is why it’s important to take this on board before you market your UK-based business abroad rather than after.