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Go big, or go home. That might be a common mantra for businesses expanding overseas, but a wide-ranging audience strategy may not always be the best approach.
In fact, it could pay for businesses to focus on specific customer segments. The Indian diaspora, for example, tends to be an overlooked opportunity.
While they are in the minority overseas, non-resident Indians make up 30 million people worldwide.
That’s a sizable opportunity to unlock, and here are three overseas expansion strategies that brands in India have used to achieve global growth.
1. Use insights to find the right export market, audience: Zee5
To expand your business internationally, you’ll need to know where the demand is and the consumer preference of non-resident Indians in those markets.
For that, over-the-top platform Zee5, which streams content in Indian languages, adopted a data and insights-driven approach.
It used its first-party data and Google Trends to understand the online behaviour of non-resident Indians across different markets. That gave it insight into people’s video viewing habits and the topics they’re searching, along with their language preferences.
Additionally, it used the brand development index and category development index to analyse diaspora markets with the largest untapped potential for Indian video content.
Armed with those insights, Zee5 grew its expansion efforts in six markets in 2023: Indonesia, Kenya, Nepal, Nigeria, South Africa, and Sri Lanka.
It also engaged audiences in each market with video content curated to suit their language preferences and interests. As a result, its subscriber numbers rose by 64%.
2. Connect via highly relevant content: Matrimony
Besides identifying the Indian diaspora markets you should expand into, it’s important to connect with customers there in relevant ways.
That’s what matchmaking service provider Matrimony set its sights on. It has a family of apps that cater to Indian audiences of different linguistic and cultural backgrounds, and it wanted to better connect with non-resident Indian customers.
So it tapped into Search insights to understand which regions in India the different diaspora communities hailed from. That helped it identify the Indian languages that non-resident Indians in a market would most likely use.
With that insight, Matrimony was able to serve the most relevant vernacular app to non-resident Indians in a market, and use the most suitable messages in its ads. For example, the Kerala Matrimony app was promoted with custom ad creatives in markets like Saudi Arabia and Qatar because many non-resident Indians there hail from the south-western Indian state.
The result: matches made in heaven.
Matrimony received 1.3X more profile registrations per month without increasing its spend on user acquisition.
3. Engage at every stage of the customer journey: Policybazaar
Besides connecting with the Indian diaspora through highly relevant content, engaging them at every stage of the customer journey also drives export growth. That’s what insurance broker Policybazaar did.
It employed a full-funnel marketing strategy to raise awareness, drive conversions, maximise returns, and establish itself as a market leader among the Indian diaspora.
To raise awareness of its products, it worked with recognisable small screen actors to create video content that spoke to the various life stages and insurance needs of non-resident Indians. The videos were delivered via non-skippable ad campaigns to maximise exposure, and placed on popular YouTube channels where non-resident Indians spend time.
To connect with high-intent customers in the decision-making phase and get them to choose its policies, it used Video action campaigns. Additionally, it tapped into Insights Finder to optimise its Display campaigns so that they showed up on popular digital publications, such as Indian matrimonial sites, which attract high-intent audiences.
And to spur sign ups, it used broad match with a Target ROAS bid strategy to drive conversion at scale among non-resident Indians with high-intent queries related to insurance.
As a result of its full-funnel marketing strategy, Policybazaar’s insurance bookings surged by 64% and its return on ad spend rose by 27%.
Indeed, niche markets like the Indian diaspora can be mighty drivers of your export growth. With the right insights, campaign deployment, and optimisation, you too can supercharge your business through international expansion.
