Launching your product for new markets and geos
Let’s say you have a great well known product that is performing great in your country and you feel like you are ready to launch it in new countries as well. Well, first of all, that is great. But it might come to you as a shock that your great performing product may show absolutely horrible stats in new geos. Why this happens?
Well, there is a rule which tells that in order for anyone to feel like they have heard about you a lot and they see you everywhere, there should be at least 6 touches with them. And since you are new on that new geo you chose it may be that noone just heard about your app. If it is online app which highly depends on users amount it may be a problem as well since people just won’t want to use the app which has no users in it. So what you should do?
The main advice here is try refocusing from performance marketing where you want all the money to be effectively spent, tracked and returned to the reach marketing. Find the platforms with the biggest amounts of users. Find some very well known influencers or bloggers from this country. Find newspapers, sites, social pages and communities, find forums, etc. Launch a massive local campaign. Make sure that as much people are able to see your ads in as many places as possible. Create these 6 or more touches with your audience. You have to break that stereotype that your app is something noone ever heard of. Make sure that you launch these ads for the same people so they get many touches from you.
The most painful part of this is that in most cases when you launch these reach campaigns you might not be able to track its effectiveness or just be limited by the reach or views amounts, nothing more. So what’s so great about this if you can’t even tell if you have enough downloads or now, if you have ROI more than 100% or not? Well, the thing is – if you just launch your typical performance based ads on a new geo you shall see significantly worse results than the ones after you have prepared the audience with your multiple reach ads. You can see it this way: users see your link and tell – oh, that app I see everywhere again. I’ll give it a try. It sound very different from “oh, I’ve never heard of it, so I’m not going to bother”, right?
Another advice is to be fast with these activities. As soon as you have launched the massive campaign, make it rain to your audience with your ads, so they will see them soon enough one after another before they forget the previous contact with your product. And when you have your audience prepared by showing them your product, you can add classic performance marketing. It always helps when launching in new geos. First time it may be more expensive than other geos where you just going with classic performance marketing, but as time goes the price will drop and you will break that unknown status for your product.