This is an excerpt from our ebook, “How to Win International Markets with Meta Ads.”
Preparing your business and online store for online audiences is hard work. But with the right promotional setup, it can pay off big time. The consumer desire for cross-border shopping is undeniable, and so are the cost efficiencies that come with international advertising. Now, let’s dive into how Facebook and Instagram specifically can help you get your point across, raise brand awareness, and sell more products.
That begins with getting your audience targeting right, on both the macro level (which countries to target) and the micro level (how to find specific audiences within those countries).
When Targeting Global Audiences, Go Broad Before Getting Specific
One of the most important decisions to start your campaigns is understanding exactly how many new foreign markets you should test into. That tends to come down to three basic considerations:
How developed are the markets?
What are the duties and taxes for shipping that market?
What markets already have an interest in the products or types of products you’re selling?
These considerations likely already narrow down your target markets. You’re essentially estimating how many people want (and can afford) what you’re selling, whether they can buy it, and whether they would choose you over a competitor.
From there, it’s time to start narrowing your focus. For all markets that fit the above criteria, analyze the total number of potential customers that have access to the internet as well as your available payment and shipping methods. The CIA’s World Factbook can be an invaluable source of information to understand demographic segments within your potential markets.
Finding the right fit your your business and products will also require research on the competitive landscape within your target expansion markets, your brand fit, and the potential return on investment of a given country or region. Other factors, like Hofstede’s Five Cultural Dimensions including power distance, individualism vs. collectivism, etc. can also help you better understand the environment into which you’re looking to enter.
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From Testing to Broader Global Targeting Options
The single biggest mistake a business count make in global expansion is investing significantly upfront, before validating that your brand and product resonates with your target consumers. Initially, the key to success is to test, learn, and iterate.
That means running small, targeted campaigns in the market(s) you’ve identified and seeing not just their initial engagement on ads, but conversion rates on your products. This initial testing process helps to not just understand your brand resonance, but can also test out important logistical matters before going broad.
The testing phase is when you’ll see whether all of those operational considerations we’ve discussed in chapter 2 are in place and functional. Does shipping run smoothly, and can customers easily order products in their native language and preferred payment method? Does your inventory support the expansion?
Make sure that the answer to all of this questions is yes. Only then can you go broader with your targeting efforts.
At some point, especially once you begin to target entire region or even worldwide campaigns, you’ll run into countries that you specifically need to avoid. For example, you might not have a business license for operations in China. In that case, be sure to mark that country as an exclusion in your Facebook Ads targeting to avoid any potential logistical or legal issues.
The Optimum Facebook Ad Setup For International Expansion Campaigns
A common question we face when working with businesses looking to expand internationally is whether to set up individual countries to target in their own ad sets, or keep them consolidated in a larger ad set and campaign. The answer is almost always the more consolidated approach, but it’s worth examining why that’s the case.
When running ads for multiple countries in a consolidated ad set, Facebook is able to dynamically diversify the campaign budget and test different countries for insights into where your target audience is around the world. Once you identify countries in which your ads and messaging are performing well, you can double-down in promotional efforts for those regions.
The key benefit: you save both money through dynamic optimization, and time to determining exactly which countries you should focus on in your international expansion.
With that said, a few situations do call for breaking out different countries into their own campaigns and ad sets. If you have identified a country that works especially well, if your product would or would not be appropriate for a particular country, if you have tailored creative for different languages, or if there is a holiday or special event you want to focus on, that individual breakout begins to reap a greater ROI than the consolidated approach.
FREE GUIDE
How To Win International Markets with Meta Ads
Read Our Comprehensive Paid Social and Search Strategy to Expand Your Target Market Beyond Borders.
Lookalike Audiences as a More Focused International Targeting Alternative
As is the case with domestic audiences, lookalike audiences are a potentially powerful alternative to broader demographic targeting especially for smaller budgets. In these scenarios, lookalikes can help to overcome false positives and generate learnings in the system that Facebook can’t easily detect, like optimizing for qualified vs. cheap leads or LTV vs. CPA.
At the same time, it’s important to keep in mind that building lookalikes across different regions differs from executing the same tactic in a single country. That difference lies largely in the strength of the audience you’re building:
If you know what countries are in your source audience to match, your lookalike audience will be highest in quality when the countries you’re targeting are also within your source.
If you have only one country in your source audience, a larger number of domestic audiences that most closely reflect your current customer base will result in a stronger list.
If you don’t know what countries are in your source audience, simply including an audience that’s as large as possible will result in a greater chance for relevant matching.
All of these nuances still build on Facebook’s complex ad targeting system. In other words, you can still pick additional countries to target that are not in your source audience; the match rate or similarity simply may not be as strong as in the examples above.
Finally, lookalikes can also be layered on top of the markets that are performing well in your existing ad sets. Building explicit lookalikes of that country or region is another way to double down on a high performer and expedite the revenue you can get from your international expansion.
To learn more about driving international sales using Meta, check out our ebook here.
