eLama, a MarTech company that empowers business owners, is actively seeking new markets for its digital marketing automation products. It aims to make a significant impact worldwide.

eLama's digital marketing automation platform stands out in the market. It offers unique features such as bidding automation, digital marketing campaign optimization, and other tools that maximize the effectiveness of digital advertising efforts for businesses.

Preparation

Business Objectives

The company experienced a decreasing customer acquisition rate due to home market maturity and decided to turn its attention to new geographies. At that point, the company needed to gain knowledge of foreign markets because it had a limited understanding of whether its products would benefit foreign customers. It needed clarity on how to approach new market entry from both strategic and tactical points of view. 

The main business objectives were to validate product-market fit, facilitate international customer acquisition, ensure global brand recognition, and facilitate business growth.

Challenges

Despite the significant challenge of having no brand presence beyond its current market, eLama saw this as an opportunity to develop an entirely new global brand identity from scratch, showcasing its resilience and determination.

Our initial market research also demonstrated that subject matter expertise and perceived company legitimacy were crucial to potential customers choosing a marketing automation solution. 

Virtually all competitors provided free trials to their customers, so facilitating product-led growth was essential to succeed in the market.

Other challenges included:

• Identifying good international markets for potential growth
• Product-market fit validation in new geographies
• Crafting new positioning and messaging to stand out from competitors
• Establishing trust and authority in new markets
• Proving subject matter expertise
• Developing a sustainable and scalable growth strategy

Strategy Goals

• Establish eLama as a subject matter expert in digital marketing to generate trust and brand recognition and to create a strong foundation for inbound customer acquisition
• Capturing high-intent leads to convert them into paying customers to validate product-market fit and inform necessary product changes rapidly 
• Identifying and testing multiple markets of interest while maintaining a balance between a uniform global brand and positioning localization

Research

I approached the challenge by first turning inward to understand current business operations. I focused on understanding how every piece of the current offering solves existing customer pain points. Who were the customers? What acquisition methods work currently, and how does every channel contribute to the overall strategy?

I identified a few key buyer personas I wanted to focus on initially. I based my decisions on the existing customers' profiles, and the preliminary research focused on those who use similar tools. That included small businesses, dedicated marketing specialists, general marketers, agencies, and freelancers.

The next step was to focus on identifying new markets of interest. Information I gathered through learning more about the business allowed me to establish the main metrics to look at when it came to new market selection. It included: 

• TAM
• How developed digital marketing was
• Average ad spend per segment within the market
• Costs of entry and regulations
• Product consumption patterns, including preferred payment methods 
• Localization considerations
• Existing competition

Market Research Methods

I used the following research methods to get a better understanding of the local markets and to generate more ideas on how to package our solution in the most efficient way to minimize market uncertainty and keep the costs within a reasonable level:

• Local professionals (agencies, marketers, businesses, and consultants) are the first point of communication within a new market
• Customer interviews with small business owners, agencies, and marketing professionals
• Benchmarking of local solutions that included their tool stacks, marketing stacks, positioning, pricing, content analysis, relevant payment methods, currencies, and specific local product consumption features (including content organization, website features, lead generation forms, and other focus areas like long-form content style)
• Keyword research with SemRush competition intelligence tools to identify future content focus
• Participated in various small business and marketing events to get a sense of the current state of affairs
• Topic research through Reddit and Quora to identify issues of concern and discover new customer pain points
• Preliminary lead generation and A/B testing. Landings used to test the positioning and messaging hypotheses that I needed to confirm
• Webinars to validate issues and get more facetime with entrepreneurs (used polls for webinar viewers and interview requests later on)
• Essential action: free paid advertising health check (gained access to Google Analytics, FB Ads, and Google Ads account to understand campaign efficiency, problems faced by advertisers, and overall marketing competence level of local entrepreneurs)

Strategy Development

Marketing Mix Development

Based on the research results, to succeed in B2B business, I needed to focus on building a reputation and demonstrating our industry knowledge. Trust was the key, so I focused on content generation as a method of high-intent lead generation, subject matter expertise demonstration, and domain authority development.

• Main channels included: Website, SEO, landing pages for long-form content, webinars, blogging and later YouTube videos, social media, including LinkedIn to create a holistic brand presence with all the channels synergetically supporting each other and overall business growth
• I needed an efficient lead capture funnel that covered all critical contact points with potential customers everywhere they were. Building awareness through educational materials, explaining how our solution could help them push them towards consideration, and gently nudging them towards converting as paying customers by demonstrating the value they could get by working with us.
• Blog posts and any piece of gated content (including webinars, eBooks, checklists, and other content types) needed to cover different levels of customer proficiency in digital advertising to be relevant to different customers and validate their pain points and how we can solve them
• How I chose topics: current customers in the home market, conversations with customers in the new markets, researching the most popular questions asked on Reddit and Quora, and competitors' content. The content was supposed to cover all steps in ad campaign creation, from budget allocation and channel selection to reporting, analysis, and optimization. The content had different levels of complexity (starting with simple channel selection ideas and ending with more complicated topics like using different code-based scripts to optimize how you work with advertising systems). It was also supposed to be interlinked to improve read time and retention on the website. Initially, the content didn't directly sell any products and services to avoid coming off as too pushy and focus on delivering value to the customers without asking them to purchase anything. It proved to be an efficient strategy in demand generation and lead capture. Guest posting was another critical element in generating the domain's reputation, especially since I needed to develop a new website from the ground up.
• In the end, our blog gradually rose to top-3 search engine results for the most critical functional keywords and brand requests alike
• Webinars: I focused on attracting partners to collaborate on content generation to build trust. For example, I conducted a series of webinars with representatives from Google and Facebook, different marketing agencies, and other partners.
• Email marketing was another critical piece in increasing conversion rates. I tracked different lead generation sources, allowing me to segment different users by knowledge, interest, and intent levels. In practical terms, I could target each customer group with a tailored message that allowed me to lead customers through the funnel toward conversion into paying customers. In-product analytics also provided rich opportunities to segment customers by their activity. 
• All this and email drip campaign automation allowed me to create a system of automatic customer conversion, significantly boosting CR and minimizing acquisition costs.

Strategy Outline

Preparation stage

• Crafting positioning and messaging
• Preparing marketing tech stack
• Preparing main assets to establish eLama as a subject matter expert. Website, blog, email funnel, social media presence. These materials covered all important marketing management aspects, providing readers with free value
• Developed content marketing plan. Content syndication was a vital piece of the strategy. It aimed to ensure high visibility of eLama's marketing collateral across all target platforms and mediums
• Complete localization into select languages. Some target markets, like Brazil, require localized content to reach most potential customers.

Initial Launch

• Heavy focus on content and SEO to generate organic traffic and start ranking on the first Google SERP 
• Lead generation through webinars, gated content, and product landing pages to provide more free value and ensure we capture more leads for future email marketing drip campaigns. Non-gated content played a crucial role in lead generation, too, since it generated organic inbound traffic that could be redirected to lead forms, thus optimizing lead costs
• Customer interview outreach to validate our positioning messaging and to support product teams by informing product backlog
• Drip campaigns with email marketing
• Converting high-intent leads into product demos and free trials

Later stages

• Offers for conversion into paying customers through direct email outreach and drip campaigns
• Workshops with customers to facilitate product onboarding and decrease churn rate
• Event marketing for brand awareness
• Hosted live events in NYC and Brazil aimed at helping customers improve their marketing automation efforts with a soft sell of eLama solution

Execution 

Required resources and team

• Dedicated marketing team
• Advertising budget
• Sales team assistance
• Customer Support team
• Dedicated local support (Brazil and USA)

Teamwork organization

• Communication with all key stakeholders and departments of the organization
• Content marketing team
• Paid ads manager
• Email marketing manager
• SEO and editors (contractors)
• Weekly blog releases 
• Monthly webinars
• Gated content every two weeks

Timeline and objectives-channels used

• First two months: research, strategy development, and initial assets preparation
  • Have localized versions of the product
  • Local positioning and messaging
  • Local landing pages
  • Setting up analytics
  • Content relevant to local audiences 
  • First drip campaigns
  • First planned webinar
• First six months: Focus on credibility, subject matter expertise, trial user acquisition
  • Big focus on Content Marketing. All stages of the funnel
  • Paid ads to support webinars, gated content, and free trials
  • Email marketing to convert webinar and gated content high intent leads into trial users
  • Creating a social media presence. Longform content repurposing 
  • Product validation through customer interviews and in-product analytics
• First year: Focus on converting trials into paid customers
  • Expanding content marketing efforts, significant SEO results, top 3 Google Search results with important keywords
  • Collecting and using customer product reviews
• Beyond the first year: Scaling efficient channels
  • Dedicating more resources to the most efficient channels 
  • Dedicated USA team for accelerated growth 

Developed assets

Localized Websites

Landing Pages

Sales Collateral

Content (Written + Video)

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