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The 5 Traits of International Marketers

Grand Central Station in New York City. NYC inhabitants represent hundreds of different nationalities. Many people consider it the most diverse city in the world. It’s also a home to around 800 languages.

You’re excited to take your business international, but you know that step is a big transition from operating domestically. Your marketing department may be well suited for connecting with your current audience, but you need to know whether they can adapt to the marketing expectations of different cultures. When you’re looking at your marketing department to figure out who should head up your international marketing efforts, here are five key characteristics to look for.

1. Empathy

A marketer’s job revolves around generating responses from your target audience, particularly emotional responses. Many marketers use emotional intelligence in their efforts to fully understand what their audience needs help with and how their company can address these needs.

Fully understanding an audience with a different cultural background requires a great deal of empathy to pick up on critical nuances that help international marketing campaigns hit the mark instead of displaying a lack of audience understanding. Your marketers can use empathy to gauge when a marketing message is creating an unintended reaction and help direct your product team to the necessary changes to your product to make it relevant in new market. An empathetic, customer centered mind will be better and faster at this key skill.

2. Courage

International marketers encounter many unexpected situations, from cultural shock to an entirely new set of marketing norms to conform to, to new tools they’ll have to utilize – translation services and many others – and new types of mistakes that can happen. Courage helps your marketers adapt quickly to new situations, ask plenty of questions without fear, and most of all courage gives marketers the energy to try new things.

3. Analytical

International marketers see the business opportunities in what they’re doing globally. They are always the looking to answer questions about like “which markets are we getting more business from”, “what are our top 10 countries in terms of revenue and user base”, what percentage of budget to allocate to each market and the ROI you’re achieving. This mindset helps them identify new international opportunities and execute on existing ones.

4. Open Mindset

Your global expansion will expose your marketers to entirely new cultures, audience demographics, and buyer motivations. Open-minded marketers are curious about the people they’re marketing to, which serves them well when they have to learn entirely new ways to sell products and services. Also, they are open to the opportunity of international growth, and see it as an opportunity, not as an added and difficult responsibility.

5. Patience

Your marketers need patience for learning about the marketing nuances involved with working in a new locale. When moving between regions domestically, there are some differences but all regions have a shared culture. In international marketing, however, your marketers have to adjust to a lack of shared culture. The adjustment process takes time and patience, as it won’t happen overnight. Patience will also be important as your whole team, the organization as a whole, shifts to this new mind set. Step by step, each team, from engineering to accounting will have to consider the nuances of establishing yourself in new countries, this will take time and patience.

International marketing is as much of an art as it is a science. Look for these key characteristics in your marketers to discover who in your team may be best suited for helping you with your international business expansion.

At Unbabel we work with hundreds of international marketing teams helping them successfully reach new audiences. Together we translate newsletters, websites, product descriptions and customer support content. Check out our products that make their work easier everyday.

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