Entering German market with the help of marketing

As a company, have you formulated the goal of tapping into new markets, but have no idea yet how? For example, think of our neighboring country Germany as a new market. How are you going to conquer such a large country without having budgets that end with six zeros? You could of course hire a German representative to drive around for you, but that is also quite pricey (especially with today's fuel prices). Still, there are ways through which you can make quick inroads in Germany and get started successfully in a smart way and with limited budget.

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Clear proposition

It starts with a clear proposition: who are you, what can you do for the potential customer and how do you do it? Is this well formulated? The tighter this story is, the better you can convince potential customers to choose your solution. This is the basis for marketing to be successful in entering a new market.

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Objectives

What is important when approaching a new market is that you set goals. This can be a financial objective, such as sales and profit, but also brand awareness (although that is difficult to measure). The importance of this objective is that you can start monitoring and measuring whether your approach is successful. For marketing, it is important to translate these objectives into marketing targets and KPIs. Based on these, you can get started and measure whether you are doing well in the early stages!

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Start small

Challenging goals and a limited budget bring challenges. To get to work effectively, it is important to have an overview and you do that by starting small. Take North Rhine-Westphalia for example, this region is as big as the Netherlands in size and is about as far from the Randstad as Groningen. The advantage of choosing one region is that it is easy to target with LinkedIn Ads & Google Ads and in addition you keep your costs down this way.

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Push & Pull marketing

Step 1 is to develop a good website with German content. Without German content you will not be found. Important here is that you do a keyword analysis in advance to determine which keywords are interesting and what the expected monthly search volumes are and who your competitors are.

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Pull marketing

With the pull marketing tactic, you want to attract people to you. You can do this through SEO or keyword advertising. With a new website or German language added to an existing website, you have to take into account that it still needs to be indexed by Google or other search engines. Organically, you will not yet be found on German keywords.
Because of this, the German organic traffic on your website will be minimal. To still get visitors to your website, you can consider advertising. With the help of the keyword analysis you can set up Google Ads campaigns. My advice here is to start small. Build one or two campaigns and then expand when you have more product groups. Experience shows that campaigns can differ from country to country and what works in the Netherlands may not work in Germany.

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Push marketing

To enter a new market or country as an organization, creating brand awareness among the target audience is crucial to your success. You can do this in several ways, but push marketing tactics are one of the most effective. Means you can use for this are social media campaigns, Google display and email or direct-mail campaigns. By pushing your message towards the target audience step by step, you want to entice them to go to your website and build a relationship from there.

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Social media in Germany

In Germany you can choose either Xing or LinkedIn, both social media channels are used for business in Germany. Xing currently still has the upper hand in terms of the number of users, although you can see that LinkedIn is used more with companies that are internationally oriented and have more employees. Depending on your target audience and the message you want to convey, you can use one of the platforms to promote yourself through push marketing. Personally, I experience LinkedIn Ads as a more user-friendly channel than Xing Ads. In addition, the cost of advertising with LinkedIn is half that of Xing.

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Measure, monitor and adjust again

What works for one company may not necessarily work for another, this is certainly the case with marketing. Therefore, it is important to monitor weekly which activities produce which results. That is the beauty of online marketing, everything is measurable. If you see that something works well, you can possibly invest more time and money in it.

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Getting Started

We have already helped numerous companies successfully get started within the German market. Get started in Germany yourself and contact me without obligation at casper.lucassen@tmcmedia.nl .

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