How To Reach A Global Retail Audience
Congratulations, your small business is booming! You have successfully made it through the rocky and unstable beginning stages of starting a small business, established a solid consumer base that can keep you afloat, and started rewarding yourself and your employees. That is truly something to be proud of.
According to the Harvard Business Review, your business is in Stage III of the Five Stages of Small Business Growth which is the Success Stage. This is the stage where you can either rest on your laurels and keep the business as is, or the moment where you take the next plunge and invest in growth tactics to expand the business.
You just can’t help but feel that it is time for the next challenge as the true entrepreneurial flame in you burns bright. How can you take your small business to the next level and see even more success?
In our increasingly more interconnected and globalized world, the easiest, most logical step in your business expansion is to reach an international audience.
But how can your local business spread to the huge world? It’s easier than you think with an online store and a plan for marketing to a global audience.
Connect With Your International Customers
A global audience is actually no different from your local audience. They are still people who will benefit from your product and who you want to engage with, but if you are trying to break into a new market, you need to know if there is even a need for your product by doing research into the regions and potential customers as you look to expand global reach.
This is the perfect example of the fact that the more specific you are about how your product can help someone, the more universal your product actually becomes since customers can more easily see themselves in specific situations and use cases. Universality through specificity is key to reach an international audience.
Personalize Marketing to a Global Audience
All that being said, even though we can all connect on a human level, there is no question that each country and region have their own nuanced cultures and languages where products and marketing tactics perform differently. This is where market research and knowing your audience’s specific desires, pain points, and culture comes in handy.
When you expand global reach, it is helpful to not just translate content into the local language, but lean into local trends, slang, and behaviors to connect with specific audiences on their own turf. Certain phrases may not translate appropriately, ending up with completely different meanings or even having negative connotations, so ensuring that you have a solid knowledge of the local vernacular is essential.
While many online users understand English these days, going the extra mile to connect with global customers gives your international digital marketing a huge boost. This is why such a high number of personalized digital marketing efforts (86%) do better than strictly English ones and most people are more comfortable reading websites in their native language.
Lean into Visual Content
In marketing to a global audience, one way to quickly bypass the language barriers if you don’t have a translation team, is to embrace visual content like pictures and videos. While the same cultural considerations should be taken with visuals as with text, your products and content still have a higher chance of connecting with a global audience on an emotional level since visuals evoke emotions faster and the message can be conveyed without words. Because of that, they don’t need full explanations and translation that pure text would.
Companies have admitted that they are ready to step out of their comfort zone when using multimedia and social media marketing to test if new approaches will work for reaching new audiences. The better an image or video represents your product or brand in a fun and engaging way, the easier and more likely it is to reach an international audience. This is where you can let your creativity shine!
International digital marketing is trending toward the edgy, engaging, and exciting, so marketing to a global audience is easier than ever by embracing fun visual content that can most easily be shared through social media.
Use Social Media for International Expansion
This is where it all comes together! After doing your research, connecting with your new global customers, and making exciting visual content personalized for them, the best way to get yourself out there is through social media. Social media for international expansion is the number one way your content can get the most engagement and as a result, your company will expand global reach.
One way to get your products and brand out there the fastest is through social listening. Most of the points in this article are aspects of social listening, but going the extra mile to have a team use the information about your audience to see if strategies are working and even find gaps in the market will put your company on top. Hootsuite conducted a social media trend survey for 2025 which showed that for many companies, social listening is the #2 priority for their social media marketing.
Social media has captivated everyone across the world, making it the no brainer choice for marketing to a global audience.
LincSell Can Help Your Company Expand Global Reach
This all sounds simple enough, right? But the real question is – How do I actually get my products online and out there internationally? LincSell is your partner in managing your in store, online, social media, and global presence all at once and from the same place.
Having an online store is the first step to reach an international audience. With help from your LincSell team, you can develop your international digital marketing plan and use social media for international expansion. We can support many business types on many levels, and are always willing to work with you on whatever your needs may be.
So now there’s no excuse to shy away from taking your business from Stage III success to future stages of growth, including growth to a global audience. You know exactly what to do: Connect with your international audience, Personalize marketing to them, Leaning into visual content and bust language barriers, and Use social media to easily connect your marketing to your audience.
You can do all of this and more seamlessly with LincSell. Find out how by booking a demo today!
