To Grow Your Business Abroad, Partner with Local Influencers

When companies expand into foreign markets, they need to gain the trust of local business partners and prospective customers in order to succeed. The most common ways of doing this are to send executives to build personal relationships with international business partners and to hire local distribution partners — or independent, third-party intermediaries — to represent their products or services overseas.

Both of these approaches, however, are time-intensive, requiring executives to spend weeks or months in foreign markets. And they can be very expensive — in addition to overseas business travel, local distribution partner relationships require significant up-front investment to get started and to manage effectively.

A New Type of Local Partner

The rise of social media has created a new type of local partner: local digital influencers. These people are local thought leaders on social media with loyal followings of online fans. They spend their days developing new content — videos, photos, blog posts, and podcasts — and engaging their followers. They build active communities both online (on different platforms) and offline (at events) around seemingly any topic imaginable — everything from beauty to AI to e-sports. Their audience turns to them for industry insights, new product information, and recommendations.

They already have the trust of thousands, if not millions, of your target customers. So why not weave your brand into their story, rather than telling yours from scratch?

This practice, called influencer marketing, is more than simply paying models and celebrities to promote a product on Instagram. Influencers are much more than the “Instafamous”: They are diverse individuals with established expertise, expansive platforms, and refined strategies of engaging target audiences and shaping their behavior. For example, consider Dez Blanchfield, whom I interviewed. He’s an emerging technology influencer based in Sydney who partners with global technology brands like Ericsson, Telstra, and Dimension Data to educate B2B buyers about their solutions, through conducting interviews with company executives, collaborating on customer webinars, and producing live social media broadcasts of corporate events.

Another example is Tao Liang, a Chinese influencer who produces content about handbags on popular local social media platforms WeChat and Weibo. Known as “Mr. Bags,” Liang previously collaborated with several foreign handbag makers, including Italy’s Tod’s, where his WeChat promotional posts generated 3.24 million RMB (nearly $500,000) in sales of a limited-edition handbag in just six minutes.

While business-to-consumer (B2C) firms in industries like fashion, beauty, toys, and consumer electronics have traditionally spent the most on influencer marketing, collaborating with a variety of different influencers across multiple campaigns, B2B firms are also increasingly turning to local influencers to engage their target customers.

Since high-priced technology solutions require multiple rounds of relationship-building, often prolonging sales cycles for B2B products, a community of relevant local influencers engaged over an extended period of time can add value by providing expert third-party content and leveraging their existing relationships of trust. For example, IBM manages a global network of “IBM Futurists” who are subject matter experts on emerging technologies, commerce, and marketing. IBM’s influencer relations team actively manages and builds its Futurist community, engaging influencers in different parts of the world to participate in events, coauthor educational white papers specific to the influencer’s expertise, and co-host webinars for local audiences.

It’s not just large multinational companies that are using the global rise of local influencers to accelerate their international growth. Today, small and medium-size companies — particularly in the e-commerce sector — are capitalizing on the trend as well. For example, one American online education company I spoke with, specializing in early childhood education, developed online relationships with Chinese childhood education influencers on the social media app WeChat.

After building relationships with targeted WeChat influencers, the company’s marketing team developed an affiliate sales model through which the influencers promoted their product licenses, and then both sides split the generated sales. It was the start of an extremely successful influencer relations program — in the first 24 hours alone, one of their WeChat influencers sold $100,000 worth of product licenses that retail for approximately $100 per year. The influencer relations program has become a core component of the company’s China market strategy — now the firm’s largest market outside the U.S. And they still do not even have a physical office there.

Building an Effective Influencer Strategy

Companies have three options when deciding how to develop their influencer marketing programs:

A local strategy with local implementation: Local marketing teams define how their local organization will work with influencers in their country, and then the local marketing team puts plans into action.
A global strategy with local implementation: Global marketing teams establish a framework and common standards for working with influencers; however, local teams in each country have autonomy to localize the approach in market.
A global strategy with global implementation: Global marketing teams establish a framework and common standards for working with influencers, and it is applied consistently in all countries where the influencer programs are deployed.

The experts I interviewed for my book — ranging from influencer relations executives to senior marketers to external agency leads — recommended global-local as the best of these three options. In this approach, headquarters establishes a strategy that is subsequently tailored for local markets. Headquarters has more resources to dedicate to developing best practices for identifying influencers, defining specific methods and goals for influencer collaborations, and tracking ROI. But a centrally managed global-global approach is less effective because some degree of localization is essential to incorporate country-specific nuances, such as local preferences around social media and local cultural norms. And a fully local approach would mean that local teams cannot benefit from experience gained from other markets or economies of scale.

Employing a global-local strategy enables companies to leverage cross-national experiences, while guaranteeing that a consistent strategy is applied in all markets. At the same time, local implementation ensures that people with the right understanding of the local market are able to translate global vision in a way that resonates locally.

Global Models Change, but Trusted Relationships Remain Constant

Trust has been and will remain essential to the success of international expansion initiatives. It is widely agreed that local connectors are a critical part of establishing this trust in foreign markets. What needs to be updated, however, is our understanding of who these local insiders are. The rapid growth of social media worldwide has created local digital influencers: thought leaders with subject matter expertise and loyal followings of online fans. These individuals can open new doors for foreign businesses by leveraging their existing relationships of trust and using their authentic voices to win new overseas customers.

Think about the influential voices in your industry. If you work in a tech firm, you may turn to the commentary and recommendations of a prominent local industry analyst known for her insights on emerging technologies like blockchain, cloud computing, or augmented reality. Or if you work in the cosmetics industry, you might identify a local content creator who produces video tutorials tailored for the unique local standards of beauty within your target foreign country.

At the end of the day, digital influence is an extension of the age-old practice of word of mouth — now via new virtual platforms to reach mass audiences in localities around the world. It’s time for marketing departments to recognize the potential of these new local voices and engage them to accelerate global expansion.