Entering the German Market with the Help of Marketing

Has your company set a goal to tap into new markets, but you have no idea how to go about it? Consider, for example, our neighbor Germany as a new market. How are you going to conquer such a large country without a budget that ends in six zeros? Of course, you could hire a German sales representative to travel around on your behalf, but that’s also quite pricey (especially with today’s gas prices). Still, there are ways you can quickly make inroads in Germany and get off to a successful start—smartly and on a limited budget.

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Clear Value Proposition

It starts with a clear value proposition: Who are you, what can you do for potential customers, and how do you do it? Is this clearly articulated? The more concise this message is, the better you’ll be able to convince potential customers to choose your solution. This is the foundation for successfully entering a new market through marketing.

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Objectives

When approaching a new market, it’s important to set your goals. These can be financial goals, such as revenue and profit, but they can also include brand awareness (although that can be difficult to measure). The importance of these goals is that they allow you to monitor and measure whether your approach is successful. For marketing, it’s important that these goals are translated into marketing objectives and KPIs. Based on that, you can get started and measure whether you’re on the right track right from the beginning!

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Start small

Ambitious goals and a limited budget present challenges. To get started effectively, it’s important to maintain a clear overview—and you can do that by starting small. Take North Rhine-Westphalia, for example: this region is about the same size as the Netherlands and is roughly the same driving distance from the Randstad as Groningen. The advantage of choosing a single region is that it’s easy to target with LinkedIn Ads and Google Ads, and this approach also helps keep costs down.

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Push & Pull Marketing

Step 1 is to develop a good website with German content. Without German content, people won’t be able to find you. It’s important to conduct a keyword analysis in advance to determine which keywords are relevant, what the expected monthly search volumes are, and who your competitors are.

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Pull marketing

With pull marketing tactics, you aim to attract people to your site. You can do this through SEO or keyword advertising. If you have a new website or have added a German language version to an existing website, keep in mind that it still needs to be indexed by Google or other search engines. This means you won’t be found organically right away using German keywords.
As a result, organic traffic from Germany to your website will still be minimal. To still attract visitors to your website, you might consider running ads. With the help of keyword analysis, you can set up Google Ads campaigns. My advice here is to start small. Create one or two campaigns and then expand as you add more product groups. Experience shows that campaigns can vary from country to country, and what works in the Netherlands may not work in Germany.

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Push Marketing

When an organization enters a new market or country, building brand awareness among the target audience is crucial to its success. There are various ways to do this, but the push-marketing tactic is one of the most effective. Tools you can use for this include social media campaigns, Google Display, and email or direct mail campaigns. By gradually pushing your message toward your target audience, you aim to entice them to visit your website and build a relationship from there.

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Social Media in Germany

In Germany, you can choose between Xing and LinkedIn; both social media platforms are used for business purposes in Germany. Xing currently has the edge in terms of user numbers, although LinkedIn is more commonly used by companies with an international focus and a larger workforce. Depending on your target audience and the message you want to convey, you can use one of these platforms to promote yourself through push marketing. Personally, I find LinkedIn Ads to be a more user-friendly channel than Xing Ads. In addition, the cost of advertising on LinkedIn is half that of Xing.

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Measure, monitor, and adjust

What works for one company may not work for another, and this is certainly true when it comes to marketing. It’s therefore important to monitor on a weekly basis which activities are yielding which results. That’s the beauty of online marketing—everything is measurable. If you see that something is working well, you can potentially invest more time and money in it.

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Getting Started

We have already successfully helped numerous companies get started in the German market. Get started in Germany yourself—feel free to contact us via the contact form with no obligation, and we’ll be happy to explore how we can help.

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